Talk:Pittsburgh Tribune-Review/Archive 1

I killed the reference to the two cited awards. They are not representative of the newspaper's work, and they're dated. More recent examples exist and I'll go find them. Until then, we should edit them out.

I also shifted the lead and history sections to reflect styles describing other newspapers (see Detroit Free Press, N.Y. Times). For that reason, the discussion about Teresa Heinz Kerry is now below the hard news about the broadsheet itself.

As time goes by, a three-second exchange between an opinion page editor and the wife of an unsuccessful presidential candidate is going to fade, and we might as well be part of that trend.

Uggggh!!! QUIT THIS! Neither the Tribune-Review nor the Boston Herald printed a gossip piece that alleged Heinz Kerry had a woman lover. The Boston Herald quoted a woman who claimed to have had an affair with John Forbes Kerry.

Why do you keep twisting this? I have the sources for your errors listed below:

OK. Finally. An editor, trying to "correct" the article showed how this erroneous statement about the politician's wife got in here.

The reference to a "very private" relationship came from a gossip column originally printed in the Boston Herald and published nationwide at various newspapers. It appears as a smear against the Tribune-Review by a liberal blogger, Max Blumenthal, that went online shortly after the Heinz Kerry incident.

Here's what Blumenthal wrote (this from www.business-journal.com/TeresaHeinzKerry.asp):

''On December 28, 1997, the paper featured an anonymously penned cover story falsely insinuating that a woman named Sheila Lawrence had had affairs with both Bill Clinton and Kerry. "Far from giving all to Bill, there was still something left over for Sen. John Kerry," who had "a very private tete-a-tete" with "sexy Sheila," the columnist alleged. In another column, the Tribune-Review mocked John Kerry as "Mr. Teresa Heinz."''

I see how this got so confused. The Boston Herald's gossip column never alleged that Heinz Kerry (the wife) had a "very private" relationship with a "sexy Sheila." The Herald suggested her husband, John Kerry, had had the affair, an oat of gossip picked up nationwide, including by the Pittsburgh paper.

Here's one version of the Herald piece:

thetrack.bostonherald.com/moreTrack/view.bg?articleid=40469

Unfortunately, Blumenthal's originally flawed perspective was picked up by Democratic operative Joe Conason and, later, by alternative tabloids such as the Philadelphia Weekly, which wrote a fanciful and, likely libelous, version of events to mischarecterize the Pittsburgh daily. A check of the author's name online found that he once had been turned down for a job by the Tribune-Review, a fact he didn't disclose in his column.

''Another young person flees: Steve Volk, formerly of the now defunct InPittsburgh news weekly, has resurfaced in Philadelphia. Little known fact: Volk, a former lackey in the Mayor Murphy administration, was once seen in the Trib offices dressed for a job interview. Later, he would devote countless inches of his media column and appear on a local cable talk show to bash the Trib. I was even the target of one of his rants when he got upset that I had been tipped off about a court hearing and the Post-Gazette reporter hadn't.

Me says good riddance.

Via Jilly, who interestingly refers to him as "the other Steve" as opposed to "the good Steve."

Posted at 9:15 AM''

That was from a cached version of the popular Pittsburgh blog run by Dave Copeland.

Wikipedia is too good to get bogged down in local gossip wars, much less incorrect notions that a major American daily with a subscription of 221,000 stooped to calling someone's wife a lesbian.

Someone continues to post the erroneous, and frankly libelous, conjecture that the newspaper accused the wife of a prominent American polititian of being lesbian. This is in complete violation of Wikipedia policy.


 * It's also a violation of Wiki policy to post unsigned comments on Talk pages. Please get a username and sign your comments. Cheers, -Willmcw 20:03, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Here's a source for some background on the Heinz/Tribune-Review matter. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=224.html   -Willmcw 20:16, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Scaife connection?

 * I appealed this issue to the administrators. In no way has the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ever accused the wife of any political candidate of being a lesbian. The charge that is has is libelous. It smears the newspaper, its publisher and the wife of the candidate. unsigned comments from 147.72.93.199

The Trib's front page last week quoted Scaife. He's appeared in dozens of issues dating back several years, including a special section that arrived with the 10-year anniversary of the Pittsburgh publication in 2002.

This is easily verified by simply checking the search category on the company's internet site, although it doesn't include all of the stories in which his name has appeared.

The site linked by another "editor" suggesting that the Tribune-Review printed libel against a politian's prominent wife (I won't repeat details from the early poster's unsubstantiated libel here) says no such thing. It discusses an Internet advocacy group's belief that an op-ed piece printed in the Pittsburgh newspaper was incorrect in its appraisal of several nonprofits funded by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

There are other internet advocacy groups that say the exact opposite. Citing either seems to highlight the fact that Scaife really had little to do with what the policy factory that churned out the op-ed piece, other than reading it in a newspaper he owns.

It's hard to believe that a major American daily would be best known for an obscure op-ed that appeared once during a fiery political campaign, but we all select the facts we wish to highlight, right?

Another conundrum is this notion that somehow Scaife is a "recluse." For all the coverage he receives in Pittsburgh for attending board meetings, charity events and political grandstanding, it's hard to imagine him as a "recluse." Of course, he seems scarier if depicted as such, which is perhaps the underlying strength of the smear. Sort of a post-modern Rosebud canard, but if it works, run it!


 * Shouldn't the article mention the publisher, Richard Mellon Scaife? I have heard that the Trib has a long-standing policy against mentioning Scaife's name in the paper --- is this verifiable?  (See  for a letter to the editor censored by the Trib; the last paragraph, as sent, had contained a reference to the reclusive Scaife, the major funder of David Horowitz.)  So certainly the Trib does engage in questionable censorship of Scaife's name from their pages... but is this truly an official policy, or even a regular occurrence? &mdash;ajo (The Tartan, CMU, Pittsburgh), 20 Jan 2005


 * Well, if The Tartan, a sometime student publication of CMU that was disbanded for a year after publishing racist cartoons and spoofs is the source of your information, not the two major dailies in town, then you're on to something! Brilliant expose, editors!


 * The article mentions Scaife in the second sentence. If you have a verifiable source for the ban on mentioning his name in the T-R, then that would be worth including. Merely cutting a paragraph from an an LTE does not indicate a general policy though. Cheers, -Willmcw 01:53, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)