'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.