Reed Irvine, who died Tuesday at age 82, was the original partisan critic of news reporting. He was the founder of Accuracy in Media, the conservative press and broadcast watchdog that trumpeted the notion of a liberal bias in the news starting in 1969.

From its beginnings as a kind of supergadfly – organizing letter-writing campaigns to editors and reporters whom Irvine thought were distorting the facts – AIM developed a sophisticated, multi-pronged offensive, employing television, radio, print ads, newsletters, and even stockholder resolutions in its quest to root out biased reporting.

According to a statement released yesterday by AIM, “Reed Irvine never claimed that he was single-handedly responsible for educating the media consuming public about biased and slanted news coverage. But the fact that 2/3 to 3/4 of current media survey respondents say they distrust the information from the mainstream press is certainly no coincidence.”

Irvine liked to say that he launched AIM “with a check for $200 from a millionaire supporter,” and audaciously announced he intended to “take on CBS, ABC, NBC, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post.” He soon found his way under the skin of several of his targets, including the Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, who famously wrote to Irvine in 1978,”You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante, and I for one am sick of wasting my time in communication with you.”

With typical elan, Irvine kept the letter framed on his office wall.

Irvine became a familiar face in the 1980s to viewers of “Nightline,” where he regularly was brought on for balance, representing the conservative critique, often pitted against the likes of Alexander Cockburn.

AIM reached its apogee in the 1980s when the tide of Reaganism was at fullbore, as other conservatives discovered how to mobilize legions through new techniques like direct mail. With the election of President Clinton, AIM seemed to lose direction, spending huge amounts of effort attempting to show, for instance, that White House Counsel Vincent Foster’s death was not a suicide, in investigations bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife. Still, Irvine soldiered on, recording a daily radio commentary and writing his columns. One of his last was a strident defense of Fox News against charges that it was slanting environmental stories.

Irvine was a native of Salt Lake City, where he graduated at age 19, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Utah, and immediately enlisted in the Navy, according to his AIM biography. He undertook a crash course in Japanese, and joined the Marine Corps as a translator and interpreter, participating in the campaigns of Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa before serving in the occupation of Japan until 1948.

In 1949, Irvine was awarded a Fulbright to study economics at Oxford University, and in 1951 took a position as an economist in the Far East section of the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board. He was an early critic of central planning and foreign aid in an era when such positions were hardly the mainstream. Later, he served as an economist on the staff of the Fed’s Board of Governors.

In 1969, Irvine left government to found AIM. At first it was little more than a few unpaid volunteers writing letters from a discount Washington, D.C., office. Within a few years, the organization was garnering positive notices from the Times and other news organizations seemingly grateful for being corrected when they had erred. In 1977, Charles Seib, ombudsman of the Washington Post, wrote, “It sticks in my craw, but I’ll say it: Irvine and his AIM are good for the press. … He is our carbuncle, and his function is to keep us in a healthy state of discomfort.”

In 1975, AIM began buying shares of stock in major news organizations, giving Irvine a platform at stockholder meetings. Most famously, he led a “Can Dan” movement to get rid of CBS News’s anchorman, Dan Rather, the arch-villain to many conservative news critics.

Irvine stressed the importance of a devotion to truth, and often referred to Arthur Koestler’s essay “The God That Failed,” which holds that a harmful truth is better than a useful lie. In 2002, he came out strongly against a proposed Pentagon plan to plant bogus stories in foreign news outlets to influence world opinion. “This is terrible,” he told Agence France-Presse. “It’s true that Winston Churchill said the truth was so precious it should be guarded with a bodyguard of lies, but there is no justification for this. There are great disadvantages in the government copying the communists and the old Soviet Union in the battle of disinformation.”

However, Irvine also had fiercely partisan ideas about which truths were worth reporting, as in a 1987 fund-raising letter issued as the Iran-Contra affair was dominating headlines. “Had the Watergate break-in never been discovered, or had it been passed over as a minor news story, no great harm would have befallen the nation,” Irvine wrote, according to a New York Times account at the time, adding that millions of lives might have been saved in Vietnam and Laos had journalists’ attention not been diverted and the presidency not weakened.

By the late 1990s, Irvine’s legacy was assured among conservatives, and in the national political culture as well, where he had virtually given birth to the partisan news criticism industry that now vies with straight news reporting for viewers’ attention.

Reed Irvine

Born September 29, 1922, at Salt Lake City; died November 16 at Rockville, Md., of complications of a stroke; survived by his wife, Kay Araki, his son, Donald, and three grandchildren.