ThisCantBeHappening.net was founded in 2004 as a blog by Dave Lindorff in a quixotic one-man effort to afflict the powerful. As the site gained recognition and readers, Dave realized that it would take more than one journalist to cause any significant degree of affliction. He approached three long-time colleagues, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young, and asked if they would be interested in joining him to form a news collective. All three, sharing Dave's profound frustration with the shallowness and fawning complicity of the establishment corporate media (and with the establishment not-for-profit media, too), signed on with alacrity and a shared desire to raise hell.

It is our hope that the 15,000 readers a month who have been regularly following ThisCantBeHappening.net while it was just Dave’s lonely project will tell their friends and contacts to check out this new expanded version of the site. It is our hope too, that the many readers who have generously contributed financial support for the journalistic efforts of ThisCantBeHappening.net to date will be joined by many, many others, so that we four can really devote our efforts to getting out the truth about America’s wars, about the corrupt economic system we live in, about the racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination and bias that permeate this society, about the ongoing commodification of culture, and about the steady assault on freedom--all stories and issues that are being ignored or papered over by the mass media.

Our goal is to give you the stories you aren’t getting from the corporate media, or to give you the stories you are getting from them, but from a different, and more honest, perspective.

We will all have beats--John, a Vietnam War veteran, covers war & peace, Linn, who studied law at Yale, covers the courts, the law, and race issues, Dave covers economics, politics, healthcare and environment, and Chuck covers culture and the lack thereof. We all will also cover whatever else grabs our interest or attention.

ThisCantBeHappening has always survived on the kindness of strangers. We need your financial support if we are going to be able to devote the time to being reporters. Please consider making a donation, however small (bigger is always welcome). Don’t just be a reader of independent journalism. Make it happen! Be a supporter of independent journalism.

So, who are we?

Award-winning investigative reporter Dave Lindorff has been raking the journalistic muck now for 38 years, since he started out reporting the goings-on of three small towns at the mouth of the Connecticut River for the Middletown Press in 1972. A regular columnist for Counterpunch, he has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as BusinessWeek, the Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and Rolling Stone. In the late 1970s, he co-founded an award-winning alternative weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, and later ran a bureau covering Loss Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Daily News. In the mid-'90s he spent several years as a correspondent in Hong Kong and China for Businessweek.

Dave Lindorff

Co-author, along with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, June 2006 and paperback 2007), he is also the author of three earlier books: This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press, 2004), Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam, 1992), and Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003).

Lindorff stumbled into a journalism career late in his final semester at Wesleyan University, where he had majored in Chinese language. It all began on a whim, when, short three credits in his last semester, he signed up for a journalism class offered by the editor of the local paper, the Middletown Press. Doing a homework reporting assignment on a routine truck crash, he stumbled upon a secret underground office for the Midldetown city government to use in the event of nuclear war, set up behind a blast door under a new fire department building. Appalled at the sight of labeled desks for officials like “tax collector,” “assessor,” and “welfare director” in this subterranean concrete catacomb, he wrote a story about the discovery, received an A, and promptly decided, “This is the job for me!” He’s been reporting on the madness ever since.

In addition to writing, Lindorff is a folk musician (guitar, washtub base and saw). You can hear some of his songs on his myspace page.

John Grant is a writer/photographer/filmmaker living just outside Philadelphia’s city limits. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and has published both fiction and non-fiction. Starting in the 1980s, he traveled to Central America and other places as a documentary photographer for publication and for exhibits of his own large prints. He shot and edited an 80-minute documentary film called Second Time Around about a seriously wounded Vietnam veteran who chose to live and work in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 35 years after his first tour there. John has been to Iraq twice during the war, once as an observer critical of the war and once as a cameraman on a documentary film.

John Grant

A Vietnam War veteran for 25 years John has been an active member of Veterans For Peace. For 11 years, he was president of the Philadelphia VFP chapter. He has taught documentary photography at Widener and Drexel Universities and for nine years has taught creative writing to inmates in the Philadelphia Prison.

While not yet old enough to collect Social Security, Linn Washington Jr. has been in the news business long enough to have seen both the introduction of computers into newsrooms and the current strangling of the news media unleashed not by the rise of the Internet but largely from greedy investors whose snatching of financial resources from profit-generating news operations has crippled news gathering.

Washington grew up in Pittsburgh, where his skill sets of writing and competitive swimming did not mesh with the rabid football focus of his hometown. (Not being able to dance didn’t help.)

Linn Washington

Washington ended a two-state/three-school college sojourn at Temple University. Too broke to return to Pittsburgh after graduation he stayed in Philadelphia working in newspapers. Journalism was not quite the mega-salaried career he had envisioned, but it’s a career that has provided extraordinary experiences, insights and travel. A columnist for the historic Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest African-American owned newspaper, Washington is also Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple, where he co-directs the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab that sends J-students into neighborhoods in search of stories the local establishment media ignore. In addition to his Temple degrees, Washington holds a law degree from the Yale University.

Charles M. Young grew up in Waukesha and Madison, Wisconsin. He went to Macalester College where he was the worst player on a football team that lost all its games in his senior year by an aggregate score of 312-46 and that went on to set the NCAA record for consecutive losses. Getting his ass kicked relentlessly on the gridiron prepared Young well for his unlucrative career in freelance writing, which began at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. It was there he met Dave Lindorff, founder of Thiscantbehappening.net and the only other member of the Class of ’75 who might have an even more unlucrative career than Young.

Three days before graduating from the j-school, Young entered the Rolling Stone College Journalism Contest, which he won. This led to a bad case of tinnitus and many profiles of famous musicians, ranging from the Sex Pistols to the Eagles to the Who to the Butthole Surfers to Jerry Lee Lewis, most of whom can't hear very well either. He has interviewed Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Beavis & Butt-Head.

Charles M. Young

Young has played bass for his rock & roll band, the Schmoes, since the Van Hise Junior High Halloween Party in 1965. He has also played bass for the Dry Heaves and Iron Prostate. In recent years, he has taken up fingerstyle guitar and can play an almost passable version of “Meat Shakin’ Woman” by Blind Boy Fuller.

“Dave, John, Linn and I are just the guys to bring down the American Empire and make a towering crapload of money in the process,” says Young. “We’re gonna make the New Journalism new all over again, and all the other blogs can eat crumbs from our table.”