Posted on 11/19/2004 5:52:12 AM PST by OESY
Reed Irvine, the founder of Accuracy in Media, a watchdog group dedicated to exposing, challenging and at times bullying those he accused of slanting news coverage from a liberal perspective, died on Tuesday at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 82. A longtime resident of Silver Spring, Md., Mr. Irvine had recently moved to Gaithersburg, Md.
The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son, Donald, AIM's current chairman.
Founded in 1969, Accuracy in Media is a group that, as Mr. Irvine described it, was intended to be "representative of the consumers of the journalistic product and not the producers." Outlining its mission, he said that AIM would "investigate complaints, take proven cases to top media officials, seek corrections and mobilize public pressure to bring about remedial action."
Ideologically, it paved the way for the tide of conservative talk shows, Web sites and news programming that would follow decades later. And while AIM occasionally lived up to its name, it also spent much of its time pursuing conspiracy theories.
In recent years, for example, Mr. Irvine turned his attention to such speculative topics as whether the death in 1993 of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, was really a suicide. He also challenged the government's explanation of the crash in 1996 of T.W.A. Flight 800, alleging that it had been caused by a rocket.
Mr. Irvine, a former economist with the federal government, retired as the organization's chairman last year; at the time of his death he was chairman emeritus. He was the author or co-author of several books, including "Media Mischief and Misdeeds" (Regnery Gateway, 1984).
"I think AIM really was the fountainhead of the effort to denounce the liberal media, and create the image of the mainstream media as very liberal," Alex S. Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "And that effort has proved quite successful."
When Mr. Irvine first turned his attentions to the news media, he was nearing 50 and ending his career at the Federal Reserve. He was moved to found AIM by his disgust at the coverage, primarily by television, of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, where he felt that the networks were unduly sympathetic to antiwar protestors.
Within a decade of the group's beginning, AIM and Mr. Irvine had succeeded in forcing attention on themselves and their agenda. He appeared on many television panel discussions. He questioned editorial decisions at annual stockholder meetings of major newspapers and journals. He demanded and sometimes received the right of rebuttal on television documentaries. He was invited to present his complaints at regular meetings with senior executives of news media companies, including The New York Times.
Mr. Irvine's own weekly column was syndicated to some 100 papers. He and his organization attacked not only the editorial emphasis, or play, given to particular stories but also the choice of reporters and newscasters, whom they accused of conflicts of interest or ideological bias.
Mr. Irvine's initial strategy relied on writing letters to editors, but when this yielded no response, he began buying advertising space for his rejected letters. He also bought shares in news media companies to be able to voice complaints at their annual meetings.
The organization reached the peak of its influence during the Reagan administration, when its paid membership reached 40,000 and its budget was $1.5 million.
In those years, AIM was powerful enough to help shape nationwide television programming. One of its most visible successes came in 1985, when PBS broadcast "Television's Vietnam: The Real Story," an hourlong documentary produced by AIM. The documentary was a rebuttal to PBS's 1983 series "Vietnam: A Television History," which AIM attacked as being overly sympathetic to the North Vietnamese.
Reed John Irvine was born in Salt Lake City on Sept. 29, 1922. After receiving a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1942, he served as an intelligence officer with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. Studying at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship, he earned a degree in economics in 1951. That year, he joined the Federal Reserve, where he worked as an economist in the Far East section of the division of international finance.
During this period, according to a biography of Mr. Irvine on AIM's Web site, he led monthly Washington luncheons devoted to discussions of policy matters. It was at one such luncheon that the idea for AIM emerged.
In 1985, Mr. Irvine started Accuracy in Academia, which was presented as an effort to challenge the teachings of college and university professors in the same way as AIM had done with the media. In this case, an indignant response was widespread, with a number of prominent conservatives joining liberals in the defense of academic freedom. A.I.A., as it was called, was never able to achieve the sort of influence that AIM had demonstrated.
Besides his son, of Gaithersburg, Mr. Irvine is survived by his wife, the former Kay Araki, whom he married in 1947; and three grandchildren.
May this champion of truth R.I.P.
No doubt he died with a smile on his face after the way the MSM outlets so blatantly revealed their true nature during this election.
I just wish he could have lived to watch us take them down.
A REAL man of truth, grit and integrity.
R.I.P., warrior.
Great is your legacy and your reward.
The Shorenstein Center is the one that gave Al Franken, professional comedian and amateur village idiot, a job and access to Harvard stationery.
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