About

News from Neptune began in the summer of 1990 as an hour-long discussion on Saturday mornings on a community radio station in Champaign, Illinois. That spawned a newspaper column (in a late, lamented Champaign-Urbana weekly and the online magazine CounterPunch) — and this website. Now there’s a television edition, through Urbana Public Television, which appears Fridays at 7:00pm on cable channel six in Champaign-Urbana — and online, at this website, soon after the cablecast.

The subject throughout has been the news of the week (generously interpreted) and its coverage by the media. The name comes from Noam Chomsky — he’s been writing sensible things about U.S. politics for more than forty years — who said,

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or
else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

News from Neptune tries to say some true things. Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy joined me on the premier of the television show on Friday, August 15, 2008. Others will take part in weeks to come. –C. G. Estabrook