Media watchdog Reed Irvine dies at 82

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.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son, Donald, AIM's current chairman.

A former Utahn, Irvine had recently moved to Gaithersburg, Md.

Founded in 1969, Accuracy in Media is a group that, as 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, 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 TWA Flight 800, alleging that it had been caused by a rocket.

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."

"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 Thursday. "And that effort has proved quite successful."

When 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 protesters.