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Reed Irvine

July, 2001
ConWebWatch

Reed Irving forced to apologize for vicious lie against Philadelphia Inquirer war correspondent

Irvine, of Accuracy in Media, falsely accused the reporter of having fabricated a story on a Serb-conducted massacre in Kosovo in 1999

In an action that pretty much screams "out-of-court settlement to avoid getting sued for libel," Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine spent a good chunk of his June 27 column apologizing for AIM's trashing of a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Apparently, the apology's appearance in Irvine's regular column was part of the deal as well, since it also appears on NewsMax.

This is no mere "we regret the error" stuff (though Irvine does say exactly that at one point). It was a decidedly vicious attack. How vicious? Here, in Irvine's words, is what AIM is apologizing for:

Accuracy in Media retracts all of its assertions challenging the authenticity and credibility of Jeffrey Fleishman's reporting in the Philadelphia Inquirer about fighting at Racak on January 17, 1999. Fleishman was in Racak. He reported the fighting at the time, as did other reporters. Our description of his reporting as "pure fiction" and "imaginative writing" was unfounded, and we should not have compared him to Janet Cooke. It was unfair of AIM to publish assertions about Jeffrey Fleishman's reporting without first making an attempt to contact him.