One of the country’s leading media critics, Reed Irvine, suffered a near-fatal heart attack last week but returned to his Accuracy in Media office yesterday.
 Reed Irvine |
Irvine’s son, Don, the watchdog group’s executive secretary, said his 80-year-old father came back to work in spite of his doctors’ orders.
“He is being stubbornly well,” Don Irvine said. “He was in the office until I forced him out. I limited him to four hours. Left to his own devices, he would be here 10 to 12 hours a day.”
Reed Irvine, a former Federal Reserve official, has been a thorn in the side of the mainstream media since founding his group in 1969. He also is the chairman of Accuracy in Academia, which he launched in 1985.
Irvine’s media critique has raised the ire of countless broadcasters, editors and reporters who deny his charge that their work is tainted with a liberal bias.
Don Irvine said, however, that some of his father’s opponents have engaged in constructive dialogue, including former New York Times Chairman and CEO Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger.
“I think there is begrudging respect by some people out there,” he said.
Several years ago, CNN founder Ted Turner asked to be invited to one of Irvine’s media events and came with his wife at that time, Jane Fonda.
Don Irvine also recalls a rhetorical joust with former Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee.
At a media event in 1972, Accuracy in Media awarded Bradlee a “Miserable Carping Retromingent Vigilante Society” award, using the editor’s own words to fashion a facetious presentation.
The award was returned to Accuracy in Media’s office the next day, Don Irvine said, with a note attached by Bradlee that said, “I cannot accept this honor.”
“We’ve had fun,” said Irvine. “It’s not all been strident criticism.”
‘History-making errors’
In a 2001 article, Reed Irvine noted that he started AIM shortly before Vice President Spiro Agnew made his famous speech denouncing the liberal bias of network television news.
“The networks were stunned by the volume of critical mail that speech generated, but they didn’t do anything to correct the problem,” Irvine said.
Irvine explained that rather than trying to persuade members of the mainstream that they have a liberal bias, his approach has been to focus on “inaccurate information” disseminated by the media “as a result of the biases of the editors, producers and reporters.”
“Those who helped me launch AIM in 1969 were mainly concerned about left-wing, pro-communist and anti-anticommunist bias in the nation’s newsrooms that nurtured history-making errors,” he said. “It had been strong for years. ”
Irvine gave several examples, including stories about Fidel Castro by New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews which were believed to have been a major factor in Castro’s successful seizure of power in Cuba. Pulitzer-Prize-winning correspondent Walter Duranty admitted to having concealed Stalin’s orchestrated famine in the Ukraine that resulted in the deaths of millions of peasants.
“Duranty, like most foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, was interested in burnishing Stalin’s image, not tarnishing it,” Irvine said.
Irvine wrote that pro-communist American journalists such as Edgar Snow “helped bring the communists to power in China by glorifying Mao Zedong, who was said to be nothing more than an agrarian reformer by those who knew better. The strongly anticommunist Chiang Kai-shek was demonized.”
“On April 13, 1975,” he wrote, “the impending communist victory in Indochina was hailed by the New York Times as promising a better life for most.”
Irvine writes a weekly syndicated column and does a daily radio commentary called “Media Monitor,” according to his website, which says he also gives about 60 speeches a year and is a frequent guest on TV news programs including Crossfire, PBS News Hour, Nightline, Nightwatch, Good Morning America, Viewpoint and The Larry King Show.
Irvine also has written columns for WorldNetDaily, covering subjects such as the crash of TWA Flight 800.
