Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is a newspaper in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. It was founded in the 1990s as an offshoot of the Greensburg Tribune-Review following a press strike at the two previously-dominant Pittsburgh dailies.
But now the Greensburg edition is run under the editorial direction of the Pittsburgh newsroom. The combined fleet of dailies project a Sunday circulation of 221,000 readers.
They are published by the Tribune Review Publishing Company, which is owned by local financier Richard Mellon Scaife. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters have won a number of national, state and local awards. It is generally considered to have a conservative opinion page [1].
Carl Prine, an investigative reporter for the newspaper, conducted a probe with the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes that highlighted the lack of security at the nation's most dangerous chemical plants following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The reporters were charged with trespassing at one plant during their investigation. [2], but were later cleared of all criminal charges and lauded for their journalism by the judge[3].
Prine and another Tribune-Review reporter, Betsy Hiel, won several awards for their combat coverage during the invasion of Iraq [4].
Despite the reputation of the newspaper for a libertarian or conservative opinion page, its Pittsburgh daily is best known for lengthy investigations [5] that expose corruption [6] [7], government boondoggles [8], social injustice [9] [10] or complex sports issues [11] [12].
In 2003 the Tribune-Review launched an afternoon tabloid, Trib PM [13].
The chain of Scaife newspapers compete against the larger Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In early 2004, unions representing Post-Gazette workers agreed to wage concessions to keep the daily afloat. Published reports showed that the Post-Gazette had lost nearly $20 million over the past decade. While the Post-Gazette shrank, the chain of Tribune-Review newspapers continued to expand, purchasing a string of weeklies that ring Pittsburgh in 2004 [14].
Edward H. Harrell, the president of the Tribune Review Publishing Company, announced in January 2005 that most of the regional editions of the paper would have their newsroom, management, and circulation departments merged and that "staff reductions" would follow. The merged papers include the Tribune-Review of Greensburg, the Valley News Dispatch of Tarentum, The Leader-Times of Kittanning, The Daily Courier of Connellsville and the Blairsville Dispatch. The Valley Independent, the only paper with a unionized newsroom and contract, will not be affected. [15] Two managers were immediately "reduced", though the exact number to be laid-off was not announced. [16]
The Teresa Heinz Kerry Incident
One of the most famous incidents for the paper occured when the Tribune-Review editorial page editor Colin McNickle went to Boston to see "[w]hat happens when a conservative commentator infiltrates the Democratic National Convention." McNickle attended a July 26 speech at the Massachusetts State House given by Teresa Heinz Kerry, who had been the subject of two attacks in McNickle's opinion pages over the past several years.
During her speech, Heinz Kerry said, "We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics"
After the speech she passed through a crowd of supporters and journalists and McKnickle asked her what she meant about "un-American activities."
Here is a a transcript of the exchange with McNickle that was recorded by The Patriot-News of Harrisburg and WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh, which aired the exchange on its 11 o'clock news:
McNickle: "What did you mean?"
Heinz Kerry: "I didn't say that. I didn't say that."
McNickle: "I was just asking what you said."
Heinz Kerry: "Why do you put those words in my mouth?"
McNickle: "You said something about 'un-American activity.'"
A Kerry campaign worker attempted to stop the questioning.
Heinz Kerry: "No, I didn't say that, I did not say 'activity' or 'un-American.' Those were your words."
She walked away, paused, consulted with an associate and returned to McNickle.
Heinz Kerry: "Are you from the Tribune-Review?"
McNickle: "Yes I am."
Heinz Kerry: "Understandable. You said something I didn't say -- now shove it."
[17].
The televised incident can be viewed at [18].
Some critics said her harsh language stemmed from the paper's printing of negative reports about her and her second husband, who was running as the Democratic nominee for president. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review had reprinted an 2004 gossip piece from the Boston Herald that suggested her husband had had a "very private" friendship with a younger female colleague. McNickle had also run an op-ed piece, written by Tom Randall of the Scaife-funded Capital Research Center, alleging that Heinz's contributions to the Tides Foundation were funding radical Islamist, environmental, and pro-homosexual groups.[19]. (The allegations were deemed false by the watchdog group, FactCheck.org [20], but were deemed factual by the conservative news agency, World News Daily [21]) and the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee [22].
“Environmental organizations have become experts at deceptive activity, skirting laws up to the edge of illegality, and burying their political activities under the guise of non-profit environmental improvement. These reports demonstrate this interconnected ‘environmental family affair’ of non-profits and their benefactors,” said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma [23].
In a section devoted entirely to Heinz Kerry's charities, Senate investigators concluded that "soft" money once donated to political parties and candidates was now being diverted under her guidance to nonprofits that often pushed radical ideas outside the mainstream, all to the benefit of her husband's campaign [24].
The Tribune-Review's environmental and investigative reporter Prine also had written a piece mentioning that Heinz [25] and other estate owners were receiving farmland property tax reductions, but never suggested she did so knowingly. Instead, the stories blamed lax enforcement by county officials and botched work by hired contractors for numerous mistakes in thousands of property assessments that hurt the environment, not helped it[26].
Prine, considered a liberal journalist within the Pittsburgh news community by many colleagues [27], was praised by Kerry's campaign for other work that aided their attacks on President George W. Bush [28] and his stories continue to be employed by the Democratic leadership [29] and left-wing outlets, including The Nation, which has lauded his probes into coal mine safety [30] and chemical plant security [31].
Prine's investigations featured prominently in Robert F. Kennedy's damning assault on the GOP's environmental record, "Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy [32]." Kennedy advised the Kerry campaign on environmental policies.
With that in mind, media critics began pointing to Heinz Kerry's long history of abrasive statements for the true cause of the brouhaha. On the campaign trail, she drew fire for castigating President Bush's wife, Laura, for never holding a "real job," despite the fact she had worked as a teacher and librarian before her husband's election [33]. Heinz Kerry also compared the prospects of a Bush re-election to "four more years of hell" [34] and erroneously said the Taliban regime was "back running Afghanistan" despite the presence of U.S. and NATO troops there [35].
During the campaign, the Boston Herald also revealed Heinz Kerry had blasted a key ally of her husband -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, brother of environmentalist Robert -- as a "perfect bastard" who couldn't be trusted, disparaging him and the Democratic Party in a 1975 book and a 1976 Herald interview and a 1971 story by the Washington Post [36].
After the election, a lengthy behind-the-scenes report on the Kerry campaign by Newsweek magazine detailed numerous moments on the stump when his "sullen" wife became a "distraction," with "sometimes erratic behavior" that led to her not being allowed to travel and speak without chaperones [37].
The spat between Heinz Kerry and McNickle continues to be debated within the press. On August 6, 2004 the Poynter journalism site posted a comment titled "Omitting the Inconveniently Telling Detail" about the omission of the connection to Scaife in most of the coverage she had seen, which made McNickle look like an ordinary reporter instead of "a journalist from a paper with a long and ugly history with Heinz Kerry and her family."[38]
McNickle -- who claimed to receive death threats as a result of the confrontation [39] -- drew a thick line between the Tribune-Review's news content, which was apolitical, and his opinion page, which was very conservative, while posting his response three days later:
- The larger question is my employer, not that I never got an answer to what even The New York Times was forced to admit was a perfectly "reasonable" question? ... Let's address the real issue here –- Mrs. Heinz-Kerry said something publicly for which any reporter worth his salt would seek clarification/expansion. What did she mean? We still don't know. Attempting to kill the questioner won't get us the answer. [40].
Overholser later resigned her position at Poynter after the nonprofit refused to allow her to name the accuser in the Kobe Bryant rape case [41].
McNickle continues to work as the Tribune-Review's opinion editor [42].