Two things took place recently that were, in a strange way, interconnected. The good thing was that Dan Rather announced his resignation; the bad thing was that Reed Irvine died.

The odd thing is that I was saddened by the news of Mr. Irvine’s passing even though, until I’d read his obituary, I had never even heard of the man. It seems that until he was 47 years old, Reed Irvine had been an economist with the Federal Reserve. Then, at an age when so many men are content to work on their slice, perfect their fly-casting skills or start up unfortunate affairs with their secretaries, Mr. Irvine decided to become a world-class gadfly. For it was in 1969 that he launched Accuracy in Media.

Like my friend, Bernard Goldberg, author of “Bias” and “Arrogance,” Irvine was dedicated to the belief that the only group in America that the news media doesn’t investigate and castigate is itself, and furthermore, was convinced that no group needed it more.

There were no media darlings, no sacred cows, who were safe from Irvine’s jaundiced eye. He not only took out after the likes of Dan Rather and PBS, but even Walter Cronkite, “the man America trusts,” God help America! Irvine made it a practice to purchase stock in media companies so that he could attend stockholder meetings and let the head honchos at, say, the New York Times and the Washington Post know exactly what he thought of them.

Ben Bradlee, the over-praised editor at the Post, once wrote Irvine a letter calling him a “miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante.” Well, inasmuch as Irvine had been a Marine, it’s probably a good thing for Bradlee he didn’t call him any names to his face. And inasmuch as Irvine had graduated from the University of Utah at the tender age of 19, and attended Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship, the chances are that, unlike some of us, he didn’t have to run to a dictionary to look up “retromingent.” (To save you the trouble, it’s a medical term for urinating backward. Which only proves that, as with most things, liberals can’t even get a handle on swearing. The first rule, as any school child knows, is to keep it short, sweet and easily understood.)

Not ever one to rest on his laurels, in 1985, Mr. Irvine launched Accuracy in Academia, an organization dedicated to ferreting out leftist propaganda in campus curriculum.

While it wasn’t Reed Irvine who blew the whistle on Dan Rather’s use of forged documents in that clumsy attempt to derail President Bush’s re-election campaign, his work over the past 35 years undeniably helped create a generation of bloggers who did the job.

I only regret that it is now too late for me to send along a note of appreciation to Mr. Irvine for his trailblazing efforts. But that’s always the trouble with reading obituaries. No matter how compelling the characters and no matter how fascinating the story, you always know the ending before you begin.

Burt Prelutsky

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©2004 Burt Prelutsky

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