Right-wing Watchdog

...Whatever the precise origins of AIM, its primary interests have been foreign-policy and defense issues, with emphasis on the need for continuing high defense expenditures and general opposition to efforts by the United States to reach agreements with either the Soviet Union or China...

...jane's fighting ships declares soviet navy most powerful in world, but new york times keeps this news from its readers...

...As media critic Ben H. Bagdikian has writJulius Duscha is director of the Washington Journalism Center...

...Irvine organized AIM in September 1969, two months before the first attack on the media by former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew...

...Irvine and Kalish read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and some other publications fairly regularly, and watch television news programs sporadically...

...Most of the money goes for printing and mailing AIM's newsletter, which has a circulation of 5500, only half of which is paid...

...Kalish says that AIM grew out of the McDowell luncheon group, but Irvine contends that while he often discussed the idea with other members of the McDowell group he also talked about it at informal meetings with other groups...

...Elbridge Dubrow, a U.S...

...An examination of AIM's tax returns, part of which are public because it is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, indicates, however, that both Kalish and Irvine may be understating the amount of money AIM has been raising...

...MURRAY KEMPTON (Mr...

...Still, they listen to Mr...

...ten in the Columbia Journalism Review: ". . . the judgment threatens to force broadcast journalism to retreat even further from investigating the most urgent problems of society...

...At Houston, Mr...

...press coverage of solzhenitsyn's letter to aftenposten ; u.s...

...He is, to the contrary, most gently treated...

...eric sevareid vs...

...When their letters to editors are not published, they buy advertising space to publish them...

...Nixon who complains that journalists won't let him get away with anything might more properly be grateful to those very best of our journalists who let him get away with factual errors for which they would fire any subordinate sloppy enough to serve them up as research...

...and errors in the reporting on the scale of a massacre in Mozambique...

...Irvine works full time for the Federal Reserve, and confines his AIM activities to his off-hours...

...The group still meets monthly in the Empress restaurant in downtown Washington...

...AIM's successes have not been overwhelming, but the organization is having an impact, in part because of the nervousness of many editors and broadcasters in the wake of the Nixon Administration's attacks on the media in recent years...

...Morris Ernst, the civil-libertarian New York lawyer...

...Neither Irvine nor Kalish takes a salary from AIM...

...Kempton is a regular commentator on "Spectrum," a radio production of CBS News...

...Kalish, who has been AIM's executive secretary for three years, is a Harvard graduate who spent eighteen years as a foreign language book cataloger in the Boston Public Library before coming to Washington to work first for the USIA for ten years and then for the Defense Intelligence School for thirteen years...

...Kalish for secretarial services...

...It concerns The New York Times' coverage of a scientific report on defoliation in Vietnam...

...The Mr...

...Both Kalish and Irvine refuse to discuss AIM's financing except in the most general terms...

...Kalish is executive secretary of Accuracy in Media, a non-profit, tax-exempt organization formed in 1969, which calls itself "America's Media Watchdog . . . protecting the right of the people to accurate, unbiased news coverage...

...William C. Mott, a retired Rear Admiral...

...Pressure groups representing political or economic points of view have long sought to influence the American media, and AIM is just such a pressure group representing a conservative, militantly anti-Communist ideology...

...AIM first obtained tax-exempt status in 1971, and in its initial report to the Internal Revenue Service for the year ending April 30, 1972, it showed contributions of only $6,412 and expenditures of $5,047...

...Kalish did mention that one donor gave AIM $15,000 last year, another donor $5,000, and that ten contributors gave $1,000 or more...

...He is the author of two books: "Arms, Money and Politics" and "Taxpayers' Hayride...

...Eugene Lyons, a Reader's Digest editor who has been an adviser to both YAF and ACU...

...The fact is that our inflation rate has lately been higher than prevails in a majority of the industrialized nations...

...From a small office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue three blocks east of the White House, Abraham H. Kalish, a sixty-eight-year-old retired Defense Intelligence School communications professor and former U.S...

...Even so, his Houston performance was described by James Reston of The New York Times as exhibiting "a remarkable range of knowledge," and Vermont Royster of The Wall Street Journal was reminded of what a relief it is when Mr...

...The facts are that we achieved our lowest peacetime unemployment rate in October of last year and that there are 700,000 more persons out of work now than there were then...

...Editors and broadcasters might well remember that as they weigh AIM's complaints...

...communist party bosses...

...Royster and Reston are journalists so scrupulous that I should doubt that, in his whole lifetime, either has committed as many mistakes about indisputable facts as Mr...

...Nixon answered one question he was obviously unable to hear, thus displaying skills of an exotic but hardly useful sort...

...Nixon gets off the subject of Watergate and can show us how precisely he can command the discussion of every public issue...

...Others associated with AIM bring articles on television programs to the attention of Irvine or Kalish...

...Kalish and Reed J. Irvine, a Federal Reserve Board economist who founded AIM and is chairman of its board, pepper The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the television networks as well as other newspapers and magazines and some broadcasting stations with complaints about their news coverage...

...Other major victories claimed by AIM include correction of errors in an ABC documentary on defense spending...

...Although AIM devotes a considerable amount of attention to defense and foreign-policy issues, it has also given a good deal of space in its recent newsletters to such other issues as coverage of the energy crisis (which it found biased against the oil companies...

...They say that in the last year or two AIM has been spending about $3,000 a month...

...The purpose of the group, called the Council against Communist Aggression and Alexis de Tocqueville Society, was to provide support for the American effort in Korea...

...Nixon's philosophy may be a question of taste, but his consistent misapprehension of fact is a clear matter of record...

...Nixon blundering on and then salute him for the cogency and the clarity of his analysis...

...AIM's most notable success has been a complaint to the Federal Communications Commission alleging bias and unfairness in an award-winning 1972 NBC documentary, "Pensions: The Broken Promise...

...The threat that AIM poses to freedom of the press will be diminished in direct proportion to the extent to which the media expose its true aims...

...Richard Gottschald, news director of WDIO-TV in Duluth, Minnesota, has written in the Radio and Television News Directors Association's Communicator: "AIM should be exposed for what it is: essentially a conservative group established to play judge and jury, and to imply to the public that the media are giving Americans an intentionally distorted view of our Government's acts and policies...

...Yet, m Chicago, he managed to mix up the schedule of our disarmament talks with the Soviets and to inform us that this country's rate of inflation is the lowest in the world...

...he can utter nonsense and have it published as though it were statesmanlike wisdom, and he can display ignorance of the most elementary order and be commended for the broad scope of his knowledge...

...The President subjected himself to a transient fit of public question-taking recently, and the comments on his answers were generally most admiring...

...But for the year ending April 30, 1973, a total of $83,202 in contributions was reported, and expenses amounted to $52,730...

...Using its own one-sided evaluations of stories, innuendo, and nitpicking critiques, AIM attempts to substitute its judgment for those of the media editors and reporters...

...The IRS does not make public the sources of the revenues involved with tax-exempt organizations...

...Irvine is a fifty-one-year-old graduate of the University of Utah who went to Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and has worked for the last twenty-two years for the Federal Reserve in Washington where he is now an adviser to the Division of International Finance...

...NBC has appealed the decision to the U.S...

...Alphons J. Hackl, AIM's vice president, is a Washington publisher who put out Edith Efron's The News Twisters and South Korean President Park Chung Hee's To Build a Nation...

...Headlines from the AIM Report, the group's newsletter, indicate some of its other recent concerns: new york times readers deceived on defoliation report J press ignores george meany's criticism of detente...

...media mum on brezhnev visit with u.s...

...The two men met at a Washington luncheon group founded during the Korean War by the late Arthur G. McDowell, who was education director of the Upholsterers Union...

...Members of AIM's advisory board include General Lewis W. Walt, a retired Marine Corps commandant...

...Irvine, for example, became concerned about the failure of the American press to give coverage to the Jane's Fighting Ships' comparison of U.S...

...and Soviet naval strength only after he happened to notice a story about the Jane's survey in a Mexico City newspaper brought to Washington by a Federal Reserve colleague who had been in Mexico...

...AIM appears to make no systematic effort to read and watch the media...

...Nixon perpetrates in one hour's press conference...

...Court of Appeals in Washington...

...Ambassador to South Vietnam during the Eisenhower Administration and a member of the American Security Council's National Advisory Board...

...agreement by CBS to set the record straight on errors in some broadcasts on banking, and the exposure of, in AIM's words, "misleading and biased media coverage of [the] December 1972 bombing of Hanoi," and "how elements of the news media had assisted the Communists in using American POWs for propaganda purposes during the war...

...There seems to be no connection between AIM and such Nixon Administration critics of the media as White House aide Patrick J. Buchanan...

...He has an office in a three-room suite maintained by his wife, who has a secretarial and telephone-answering business...

...The common bond of the loosely organized group is a militant anti-Communism, and speakers at the luncheons have included Russian refugees and many persons who have spent their lives studying Communism or made anti-Communism almost a career...

...He proclaimed that the present unemployment rate of 5.2 per cent was the lowest peacetime level we have enjoyed in eleven years...

...and William Y. Elliott, Harvard professor...

...a Newsweek error grossly overstating the number of persons killed during the Chilean coup last fall and which was pointed out by both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal before AIM's critique appeared...

...NIXON'S NONSENSE Of all the mysteries of our public life, the one hardest to understand is the persistent notion that our journalism is unfair to President Nixon...

...Kalish estimates, "We may have spent $35,000 to $40,000 last year...

...alexander solzhenitsyn on news media coverage of the hue massacres of 1968...

...Often they come upon matters of interest by pure chance...

...It is noteworthy that of the first three formal complaints taken by the new National News Council, one is from AIM...

...AIM's other officers and the membership of its National Advisory Board further indicate its conservative, anti-Communist orientation...

...I would doubt," Irvine said, "that AIM's total expenditures since it started have amounted to $100,000...

...The decision marks the first time the FCC's controversial "fairness doctrine" has been applied to documentaries...

...Both Kalish and Irvine give the usual explanation for keeping their funding secret: that people would not donate money if their names were made public...

...Last fall the FCC found that the program, which criticized the shortcomings of some pension systems, did not present a balanced view of pension plans...

...Kalish, who gets a government pension, spends all of his time on AIM activities...

...Information Agency writer, publishes a monthly newsletter criticizing the media and fires off letters to editors and broadcasters taking them to task for news coverage he deems "inaccurate...

...J. L. Robertson, retired vice chairman of the Federal Reserve...

...Kalish reported that an appeal for funds last fall brought in $60,000, which is being used to pay this year's expenses...

...AIM pays a modest rent for the office and reimburses Mrs...

...Both Irvine and Kalish are avowed conservatives who see the American media as staffed with liberal reporters and editors whose news judgment reflects their political views...

...Francis G. Wilson, AIM's president, is a retired University of Illinois professor of political science who has been active in Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union...

...The thirty to one hundred persons who show up for the luncheons include representatives from trade unions, business groups, the Government, and universities...

...And replying to this inquiry of whose tenor he was unconscious, he proceeded to indicate that he was also unconscious of the projected approach of another beef shortage next winter...