the Columbia Journalism Review said that "[Irvine] was stone blind to his own prejudices, and he could be scurrilous and unfair in his attacks, but he knew something about our major media" and credited Irvine in part for the rise of the popular conservative view that the American media is imbued with a liberal bias. According to The Washington Post, while Irvine worked at the Federal Reserve, co-workers he would eat lunch with often “complained that conservative points of view were not adequately reported in the media.” In his way of changing this, Irvine formed AIM. It is also said that Reed Irvine was urged to start the organization after the 1968 Democratic National Convention because he thought the mainstream media networks were overly sympathetic to antiwar protestors. Membership to AIM grew significantly when Reagan was president, topping 40,000 members with a budget of $1.5 million. As the organization grew, Reed Irvine was also a shareholder in media companies. During a shareholder meeting for TBS in 1989, Irvine said at the meeting that conservative leaning organizations had a difficult time getting their views presented on TBS and this was not the case for more liberal leaning groups. As of April 2020, the current president of AIM is Adam Guillette. Funding AIM's income in 1971 was $5,000. By the early 1980s, it was $1.5 million. In 2009, AIM received $500,000 in contributions. At least eight separate oil companies are known to have been contributors in the early 80s. Only three donors are given by name: the Allied Educational Foundation (founded and chaired by George Barasch), Shelby Cullom Davis, and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife gave $2.2 million to Accuracy in Media between 1977 and 1998. AIM has been funded by Exxon. Controversies War coverage AIM was critical of media reports about the harmful effects of Agent Orange, a military herbicide with adverse health effects for humans, in the Vietnam War. AIM blamed the U.S. media for the loss in the Vietnam War. AIM criticized the 1983 PBS documentary series Vietnam: A Television History as being pro-communist. According to The New York Times, one of AIM's greatest accomplishments was the documentary, Television's Vietnam: The Real Story in response to the PBS series. AIM charged the alliance conducting the NATO Kosovo intervention in 1999 with distorting the situation in Kosovo and lying about the number of civilian deaths in order to justify U.S.