Reed Irvine

Who was Reed Irvine?

Reed Irvine was an economist who founded the media watchdog organization Accuracy in Media, and remained its head for 35 years. Irvine was motivated by his early perception that established news media from the dominant television news media to large city newspaper reporting was colored and biased in favor of a socialist perspective. He became concerned that this dominant perspective was also shaping the way the dominant media reported foreign news and events.

Notable commentaries focused on the El Salvador Civil War, the Persian Gulf War, and the Clinton administration.

On the El Salvador Civil War, he criticized reporter Raymond Bonner with particular regard to his reporting in the New York Times of the El Mozote massacre. He devoted an entire edition of the AIM Report to Bonner, reporting that "Mr. Bonner had been worth a division to the communists in Central America." In 1992, as part of the peace settlement established by the Chapultepec Peace Accords, the United Nations-sanctioned Commission on the Truth for El Salvador investigating human rights abuses committed during the war supervised the exhumations of the El Mozote remains by an Argentinian team of forensic specialists. The Truth Commission stated in its final report: "There is full proof that on 11 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote, units of the Atlacatl Battalion deliberately and systematically killed a group of more than 200 men, women and children, constituting the entire civilian population that they had found there the previous day and had since been holding prisoner."