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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.
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.
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. [1] (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/business/s_295006.html)[2] (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05020/445110.stm)
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.
Heinz made this this comment during her speech:
- "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. Here is a a transcript of the exchange with McNickle:
- 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] (at which point she was informed of his identity)
- HEINZ KERRY: [Returns] You said something I didn't say. Now shove it![3] (http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/7/27/122700.shtml) [4] (http://www.business-journal.com/archives/20040729TeresaHeinzKerry.asp)
A television report can be viewed at [5] (http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/3576476/detail.html).
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.[6] (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/search/s_169770.html). (The allegations were deemed false by the watchdog group, FactCheck.org [7] (http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=224.html), but were deemed factual by the conservative news agency, World News Daily [8] (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37244)).
Others pointed to Heinz Kerry's long history of abrasive statements.
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."[9] (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=54&aid=69596) McNickle posted 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. [10] (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=54&aid=69731).
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