Accuracy In Media (AIM), launched in 1969, is closely associated with founder Reed Irvine. In AIM's first year, Irvine advocated that Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and the Progressive Labor Party be charged with sedition during the Vietnam War. "If you're going to halt treason, you've got to do it while it's small," Irvine said at the time (Village Voice, 1/21/68).
Much of AIM's work is dedicated to getting those they disagree with fired. In 1982, AIM engaged in a campaign against Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, criticizing the Central America correspondent for reporting that U.S.-trained troops had massacred civilians at the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. AIM and its media allies (notably the Wall Street Journal editorial page) were successful in getting Bonner removed from his beat; years later, U.N. excavations at the site confirmed his story (Extra! 1-2/93).
This censorious attitude is linked to the group's disdain for the First Amendment: AIM used to offer as a premium the book Target America, by AIM board member James L. Tyson, which proposed that mandatory government "ombudsmen" be placed at each of the major networks to ensure "accuracy" and "fairness" when dealing with "large, difficult questions."
AIM has frequently criticized media coverage of its corporate backers (for example, oil and chemical interests), but much of Irvine's advocacy has little or nothing to do with media. In the 1990s, he urged the use of napalm against Salvadoran guerrillas (AIM Reports, 3/90), as well as encouraging the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq during the Persian Gulf crisis (Seattle Times, 1/16/91)....
The Media Research Center is headed by L. Brent Bozell III, the former director of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. In 1992, he took a brief time-out from the MRC to serve as finance chair for Patrick Buchanan's primary challenge to George Bush....
The MRC's main publication is MediaWatch. It also publishes the MediaNomics newsletter, part of MRC's Free Market Project, devoted to explaining "what the media tell Americans about free enterprise." Notable Quotables is the MRC's "bi-weekly compilation of the most outrageous examples of bias," but it often reads more like a collection of statements the MRC does not agree with....
The Center's now defunct TV, Etc. newsletter tracked the allegedly leftist politics of entertainment industry figures-devoting considerable energy to publicizing the off-screen comments of people who make their living reading lines written by other people. (The project bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Red Channels, the McCarthy Era blacklisting journal.)... TV, Etc. seems to have been replaced by the Parents Television Council. The PTC, launched in 1995...tracks programming content with its "Family Guide to Prime Time TV."
The main analytical technique used by the Center -- the counting of "thematic messages" -- is extremely dubious, eliminating all messages that fail to make an explicit statement of opinion...this technique often produces highly distorted findings....
An example was an MRC study cited in Media Monitor, 4/91 on the Gulf War threw out 5,666 of 5,915 messages, focusing only on what the remaining 249 said about the War. To learn more about MRC's bogus methodology, check out the FAIR site.
While the CMPA is often described at "non-partisan," it certainly seems to be a conservative project. Fundraising letters for the launch of the Center contained endorsements from such centralists as Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ed Meese and Pat Robertson. While Robert Lichter has said that "it's not in a scholar's blood to have an ideology," he's also criticized journalists like Peter Arnett for "seeming themselves as citizens of the world" rather than as patriotic Americans, according to an AP report (4/27/91).