Informed Sources is a novel by Willard Bain (not attributed in this first edition) that used a series of Associated Press–style dispatches to expose how language and news media function as instruments of social control, and to imagine their seizure and transformation by revolutionary forces. The book is framed as the internal information network of the Peripheral Underground Movement (PUM), a parody of and challenge to establishment wire services. Its “dispatches” follow multiple stories at once, including sensational, distorted crime items and countervailing bulletins, making visible how the media define reality by selecting, angling, and repeating information in ways that keep people “chained to capitalism and to consumer consciousness.”
Drawing on a "post-Burroughs" and "post-McLuhan" sensibility (as John Sinclair wrote in a review), Bain mimics the cadence, typography, and language of the mainstream press in order to show that whoever controls information flow also controls the limits of possible action. Within the novel’s world, the alternative service Informed Sources initially merely reproduces the “decadent form” of the establishment media, but it is ultimately infiltrated and overthrown by “Green Dreams,” a purer revolutionary current that represents the conscious transformation rather than the continuation of existing media forms. | 
