'08 Media: It's time to focus on Richard Mellon Scaife

Since the presidential race is starting to shape up with Edwards and Obama announcing their respective campaign and exploratory committee, it is worth looking at how the media defines the candidates.  Chris Bowers has a thoughtful post up at MyDD about the progressive blog network and Daily Kos has seen several diaries on the current campaign to stand up to KSFO's hate radio.  This diary seeks to shine light on what one of the oldest festering sores of the right wing noise machine is doing as the race begins to take shape.  Regardless of which candidate you support in 2008, please watch out for Richard Mellon Scaife's smear jobs.

A bit of background: Scaife is a billionaire who inherited his money from the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, has bankrolled right wing think tanks for forty years (leading the Washington Post to call him the "funding father of the right"),  funded the Arkansas Project in 1993 that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (the history of which was nicely covered by Media Matters after Teresa Heinz Kerry rightly called them out in 2004.)  

Scaife's target du jour is Barack Obama.  On the day Obama filed papers to establish an exploratory committee, the Tribune-Review ran a smear piece in an attempt to define the Senator as being of questionable morals by distorting his discussion of teenage drug use, and implying that his ties to ACORN might be illegal.  As Archpundit notes, this is exactly the kind of attack Scaife used against Bill Clinton, creating the context for the Whitewater scandal, the ridiculous Vince Foster rumors, and, ultimately, impeachment.  If you are an Obama supporter, Scaife's salvo should be a concern, but regardless of your candidate, you should be concerned.  Should Scaife see Edwards, Clark, Richardson, or any of the other candidates as a possible White House contender, he will smear them as well.  Hillary Clinton needs no introduction to Scaife, as she had him in mind when she spoke of a vast right-wing conspiracy targeting her husband a decade ago.  The man needs to be marginalized.

Richard Mellon Scaife is a private individual.  Not much is known about his personal life, though we know that he is estranged from his second wife and had her arrested for trespass and assault at his house at 5201 Westminster Place in Pittsburgh a year ago, charges that were dismissed last summer.  He closed Graffiti, one of the more popular music clubs in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood, in order to store a collection of vintage automobiles.  (This action was classic Scaife.  The move hurt the local music scene, eliminating a venue within walking distance to the city's largest universities in order to satisfy the man's selfish desires.)  Despite assailing Obama over his teenage drug use, Richard Mellon Scaife's alcoholism was a pressing concern well into his fifties.  More on the man may be found in the Washington Post articles linked above, and on his Wikipedia page.  The reclusive billionaire remains both a smear artist and a hypocrite; his tactics have not changed and we should be on the alert for more hatchet jobs like the one the Tribune-Review ran today on Obama.  Recognizing and debunking his work will be crucial over the next two years.

•  Scaife will try to Clintonize Obama

  I won't be surprised if there is another Paula Jones waiting in the wings to scream sexual harassment.

  by Progressive Moderate on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 09:34:44 PM PDT

  •  and Billify Hillary?

    we should all sign up to play paula jones, take the money, then rat out the VWRC at the last minute...

    by Snarcalita on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 12:34:29 AM PDT

•  Felt a need to point his schemes out...

  Even though the Tribune-Review doesn't have Fox News's audience, it is a media outlet to worry about.

  by Nuisance Industry on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 09:37:33 PM PDT

  •  This Is What Progressive Taxation is About

    The problem for democracy isn't that some of the nobility are bad. It's that all of the nobility are nobility.

    This is why nobody must get this powerful. Our system can't cope with forces on the scale we've let them grow these days.

    by Gooserock on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 10:03:38 PM PDT

    •  I think that

      this has something to do with how old a nation is. Older nations seem to be able to absorb the extremes much easier than the younger countries. from an outsiders POV the US population hasn't developed the skeptiscism that would immediately reduce the power of a Scaife by 90% i.e. enough of the population would trace a publication or article back to the original funding. The Think tanks which were  always pseudo intellectual circular referencing bullshit would never take hold in a more skeptical society and the fact that the biggest chunk of funding comes from people with a strong agenda would negate their function.

      by stevej on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 10:20:24 PM PDT

      •  What a load of crap

        Unlike America, which only dates back to the Enlightenment, China goes back thousands of years and thus must be clear-headed and stable.  No extremes there because the population will quickly see through any propaganda, right?  Ever hear of the Cultural Revolution?

        Or maybe by old you mean how long a country has been operating under the same system of government?  But by that standard the US is one of the oldest countries in the world.

        What makes Europeans so skeptical is getting repeatedly screwed by their elites, particularly in the First World War.  And having a lot of really bad tabloid newspapers.  

        My ancestors have lived in America since the mid-1600's.  Harvard was founded in 1600.  There's no such thing as a "young country" but if there was, America wouldn't be one.

        by Turquine on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 02:57:57 AM PDT

  •  I read somewhere that

    he had bought up all of the little news outlets in Western Pennsylvania and uses this platform to beam his right wing nut ideas into the little backwood hamlets of that region.  This man has lots of money and was instrumental in funding a right wing magazine (can't remember the name) but David Brock wrote all about how sleezy they were in his book  "Blinded by the Right".

    by hairspray on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 11:05:19 PM PDT

    •  The magazine was American Spectator

      He gave the rag $2.4 million as part of his Arkansas Project, then cut the funding after it was not sufficiently wingnutty in reviewing a book he funded.

      by Nuisance Industry on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 04:46:04 AM PDT

  •  Excellent diary. Investigate Scaife & Murdoch,

    etc. They are all very corrupt, and can be brought down by their own crimes. Investigate. Investigate now, in Congress. Many, many crimes are being committed. Don't think so? What about all of those illegally paid for hire 'journalists' like Armstrong Williams. Bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.

    by doinaheckuvanutjob on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 12:15:27 AM PDT

•  Scaife confuses Liberals with Manson's

  so-called group of hippies.

  The styles and sounds of the 1960s scared Scaife & Co.

  I say: infiltrate.

  by LNK on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 09:37:40 PM PDT

•  this ties right in to my post

  We have to regain control of the public airwaves.  Otherwise Clear Channel, Scaife, and the other monied interests will continue to distort things to their ends.

  by 8ackgr0und N015e on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 09:43:49 PM PDT

•  somehow

  we've got to make him as evil a figure as the RW has made George Soros. How scaife's escaped the scrutiny that seems to follow Soros around is just ridiculous, considering how "liberal" the media is supposed to be.

  by dougymi on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 09:46:58 PM PDT

•  What Scaife Did to Clinton Was Much Worse Than

  Monica.

  I suspect it's what drove him rightward after his campaign foundered on Paula Jones, onward to NAFTA, China MFN and media consolidation.

  I may be crazy but I don't think original candidate Clinton would have [needed to] advance so much of the conservative agenda in the absence of the massive attacks on him beginning during the campaign.

  by Gooserock on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 10:01:54 PM PDT

  •  I think you may be right.

    Clinton had to get some things done (and he did plenty considering Gingrich et al)with that pack of hyenas after him.  The news media and NYT with their investigative crew of Howell Raines, Jeff Gerth and Steve Labatton for starters kept whipping a story until they finally created a president "plagued by scandals".  Raines finally got his, but Gerth was still working the Wen Ho Lee story last time I looked.

    by hairspray on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 11:11:45 PM PDT

  •  I'm not so sure about that

    Remember why the DLC was formed to begin with.

    by alizard on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 12:05:25 AM PDT

•  What bothers me about the uber-rich

  right-wingers like Scaife, Koch, and Moon isn't so much what we can see that they're doing--which is bad enough--but what we can't see.  They're clearly corrupt.  And if they're this bad openly, what are they up to where the sun don't shine?  With their money, they could fund some pretty vile dirty tricks on an international scale.

  by tovan on Tue Jan 16, 2007 at 11:57:01 PM PDT

•  I do wish there were a way

  to make his life and evil doings so VERY public that he would be totally marginalized and discredited. Hell, no one would even have to lie or obfuscate to show what a total butt head he is. No better disinfectant than sunlight, and all that.

  by tigerdog on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 12:08:02 AM PDT

•  You're right!

  This should've been rec'd by more people...

  by recontext on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 12:29:34 AM PDT

•  Keep an eye on Scaife's media activities

  You're absolutely right. Speaking of his media meddling, one of his most effective investments was the Independent Women Forum which trained women (and some men) for newsmedia appearances and helped to get them scheduled into spots on the talk news circuit (Back in the 1990s I was the first to discover Scaife was a significant funder of IWF, and for a couple years I maintained "The Viewer's Guide to Talk News" to keep track of IWF people as well as a zillion others during the Clinton Impeachment wars in late 1990's; the "Viewer's Guide" was featured on PBS in a segment on TV lawyers during Clinton scandals and impeachment debates).

  Independent Woman's Forum was famous for several nasty anti-Clinton "blond bimbos" whose names escape me at the moment but the most famous grad -- and most effective attacker of Clinton -- was (drum roll) Barbara Olson (RIP) whose husband Ted Olson was not mentioned in Wikipedia (as he seldom is mentioned anywhere else) for his role behind the scenes at the American Spectator making sure the anti-Clinton "Arkansas Project" (also financed in part by Scaife) did the worst possible damage to BC. Ted Olson was thick with Scaife, yet his role as a consummate Clinton smear-meister was never mentioned when he argued Bush's case before the Supremes in 2000 and later was confirmed by Congress as US Solicitor General -- Lordy, what a one-man band he was).

  You can't say Scaife has not been smart about where he puts his money. He tried to finance a professor chair at posh Christian-oriented Pacific Ocean-front Pepperdine Univ for "Independent" Prosecutor Ken Starr, a gesture so blatant for appearance of quid pro quo that Starr declined -- at that time -- but now guess where Starr is? Happy as a clam teaching law (huh?) at Pepperdine.

  I've always wished Dems would create their own version of the Independent Women's Forum, not for women so much as being an effective training camp for Dem/progressive talk news circuit commentators, to learn how to talk confidently and effectively in sound bites about progressive issues (a tough task), and get themselves positioned and scheduled repeatedly into spots around the MSM, like a talent agency. Instead all we've got are the likes of Donna Brazille (not good enough by a mile, IMHO).

  by wardlow on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 01:36:28 AM PDT

•  Recommended - I hope this makes the Rec list

  I loathe what Scaife has done to undermine the mainstream churches. His sole goal is to turn them into watered down versions of his current supporters, just because the mainstream churches actually support Christian policies that make him and his cohorts look bad.

  by Wee Mama on Wed Jan 17, 2007 at 06:13:55 AM PDT