REED IRVINE TAKES AIM AT LIBERALS IN THE MEDIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000100020008-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 3, 2010
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: September 1, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/03: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100020008-7
By Glenn Garvin
WASWNGTCN TIMES STAFF
Katharine Graham stared out
from the podium with a weary
expression. It had been a long
stockholders' meeting, and out
there on the floor there was a riot going
on. First these people had demanded
that she fire Ben Bradlee, her newspa-
per's executive editor. Then they wanted
the head of Bob Woodward, her metro-
politan editor, who not so long ago had
won a Pulitzer prize for exposing
Watergate. And now - now they were
demanding to know the identity of the
mysterious Deep Throat, the Washington
Post's master Watergate source.
Mrs. Graham looked squarely at her
chief tormentor, a graying 59-year-old
retired economist named Reed Irvine.
"I discussed your letter two or three
years back, I remember, with one of
the editors," she said. "And they said,
'Irvine doesn't want an answer. He
wants to machine-gun our feet and
watch us dance: And that is what you
do want.
"And," she added, "I am calling an
end to this meeting:"
000
The bullets were bouncing all around
William S. Paley's feet. The chairman
of America's most watched television
network was trying to explain why TV
cameras were banned from a CBS
stockholders' meeting in New Orleans.
A few years before, he said, cameras
caused "a very bad experience...It did
something very strange to the audience
itself. It was very disruptive...:.
Reed Irvine took the microphone.
Would CBS, he wondered, be recom-
mending to Congress and other organ-
izations that TV cameras be banned
because of their disruptive effect?
"No. I would not," Paley answered.
"Just CBS," Irvine retorted.
What Paley didn't say was that he
had heard a report that Reed Irvine
might try to bring his own camera crew
to the meeting. That was when CBS
suddenly realized that television cam-
eras can cause trouble.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
1 September 1982
Sydney Gruson, the vice chairman of
the New York Times Co., wanted to make
sure the reporter had the quote right.
"Now what did I just say about Irvine?"
he asked. "Read it back."
"
... I find Reed an extremely difficult
adversary,"' the reporter read from his
notes.
"Oh, no," Gruson said reprovingly.
"You left out intelligent. I said, an
extremely intelligent difficult adversary.
Be sure you get that right. Life's diffi-
cult enough without dropping 'intelli-
gent'from that description."
Gruson paused. "And that," he
declared, "is all I'm going to say."
If communism is
cancer to Irvine, then
there are a host of
other diseases that
infect liberalism,
perhaps not so lethal,
but dangerous
nevertheless. The AIM
Report offers
prescriptions.. .
Reed Irvine, as he will be happy to
tell you in exquisite detail, lives in a.
world very different than the one you
read in most newspapers or see on the
evening news. In Irvine's world, we
won the Vietnam War on the bat-
tlefields and lost it on the television
screens. In Irvine's world, the Wash-
ington Post was responsible for the
deaths of several million innocent
Vietnamese and Cambodians by run-
ning its stories on Watergate. In
Irvine's world newsrooms may be pop-
ulated by communist agents and -
more commonly - their well-
intentioned but hopelessly dumb
dupes, the liberals. In Irvine's world,
we would be wondering just why it is
that Walter Cronkite hardly ever says
anything bad about Russia.
Irvine runs Accuracy in Media.
which grew from little more than a,
post office box and a few sheets of
stationery in 1969 to a bustling orga-
nization with a dozen or so employees i
and a budget of something over S1
million today. About 30,000 readers,
many of them fervid letter-writers,
subscribe to the twice-a-month AIM
Report. It is fair to say that the stories
in AIM Report ("The Soviet Line in
Our Media, "'U.S. Media Push Foreign
Propaganda:' "You Can't Trust Dan
Rather") are not likely to be found in
most newspapers. At the end of every
newsletter, under the heading, "What
You Can Do:' Irvine gives his readers
the names and addresses of this
month's target: perhaps a recalcitrant
managing editor, perhaps a corpora-
tion that stubbornly keeps advertising
on CBS documentaries. A raging tor-
rent of letters is sure to follow.
Irvine drives a lot of journalists crazy
- so much so that most of them refuse
to even discuss him. Dan Rather, Walter
Cronkite, Harry Reasoner and Mike
Wallace all refused to take phone calls
about this story So did nearly everyone
at the Washington Post. "Reed has made
a lot of money flogging this newspa-
per," explained one Post official who
declined to talk. "The dumbest thing I
could possibly do would be to give him
more ammunition:'
Some Post editors have made their
feelings known elsewhere. In 1978, the
paper's editor, Ben Bradlee, sent Irvine
a note. "You have revealed yourself as
a miserable, carping, retromingent v'gi-
lante," Bradlee wrote, "and I for one
am sick of wasting my time in com-
munication with you." (Webster's
defines "retromingent" as "discharging
the urine backwards:' As William F
Buckley mused in print, "it isn't imme-
diately clear how this is biologically
possible, and not at all clear why it is
disparaging:") The delighted Irvine
immediately had the letter blown up to
poster size and hung it on his wall. Later,
Bradlee became less prolix in his crit-
icism of AIM. When informed that, in
the wake of the scandal over Janet
Cooke's Pulitzer prize-winning fake
story about an 8-year-old junkie, AIM
CQN l D
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/03: CIA-RDP90-00845R000100020008-7