Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is an American newspaper, and the third largest newspaper in the state of Pennsylvania. Its publisher is Richard Mellon Scaife and is generally considered to have a conservative opinion page.

Since its founding more than a decade ago, following a press strike at the two previously dominant dailies, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters have won a number of national, state and local awards.

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. Prine and another Tribune-Review reporter, Betsy Hiel, won several awards for their combat coverage during the invasion of Iraq.

In 2003 the Tribune-Review launched an afternoon tabloid, Trib PM. Both newspapers compete against the slightly 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.

In 2004 the paper stopped carrying Sam Francis' columns following a piece in which he attacked implied miscegenation in a television ad. The Tribune-Review was the only major paper to carry Francis's columns, whom the Anti-Defamation League has long called a "white supremacist" and who was fired by the Washington Times in 1995 for his outspoken views on race.[1][2]

Total regional circulation is estimated at 221,000, which makes the new regional broadsheet the 47th largest daily nationwide, just above the Seattle Times, according to the Audit Bureau of Reviews.

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 repeated attacks in McNickle's opinion pages. Following her speech he quoted her in a question, asking what she meant about "un-American activities." A transcript of the incident reads as follows:

MCNICKLE: Un-American activity? You mentioned un-American?

HEINZ KERRY: No, I didn't say that.

MCNICKLE: What did you mean?

HEINZ KERRY: I didn't say that. [Walks away]

HEINZ KERRY: [Returns] You said something I didn't say. Now shove it![3]

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.[4]. (The allegations were deemed false by the watchdog group, FactCheck.org [5], but were deemed factual by the conservative news agency, World News Daily [6]).

External link

• Pittsburgh Live web site