Who is Richard Scaife?

Who is Richard M. Scaife and why should you care?

This story starts with a benign announcement that All News radio station KQV-AM in Pittsburgh is picking up Laura Ingraham’s radio show. Is this a hint that another all-news AM station is about to convert to 21 hr/day syndicated talk blather?

KQV is a very peculiar station – among its alumni are Rush Limbaugh, Joey Reynolds and Jim Quinn – Rush and Quinn were Rock and Roll DJs and Joey Reynolds as program director. KQV was Pittsburgh’s ABC station in the mold of WABC in New York and WLS in Chicago in the 1960s – during the final decade of AM Music, they hyped the music of the era with DJs that sounded like they were strung out on amphetamines, lots of echo and reverb and jingles (corrections welcome if I misuse drug terminology…) – the station for a while had a street level studio at 7th and Smithfield Street with the advanced computer automation and tape machines of the day…

As FM began to take over music, in 1975 ABC sold KQV to Taft Broadcasting, which by 1982 decided it didn’t want the station any more either (the economic decline of the area was well underway by 1982)

These days, the station is running All News (more or less). They were one of the last stations still carrying Bruce Williams and play lots of reruns of the great radio shows on the 1930/40s….

There isn’t a lot of news in Pittsburgh these days, other than the running count of the number of people who no longer live there. KDKA is a mere shadow of its former self, WJAS drones on playing music from the 1930s to allow the Greatest Generation to die in their nursing homes listening to familiar music, and WWSW was absorbed into Clear Channel and turned into a Fox Sports drone… Even the ground breaking African American owned WAMO is now mostly dead – being transformed eventually into a group of 3 stations run by a Catholic lay group…

So who owns KQV and why this odd all news format in a dying city? In 1982, Taft said it was going to unload the station, and the station manager Robert Dickey (no relation to the Dickey’s in Atlanta that I know of)… talked his friend Richard M Scaife into buying the station. The “M” stands for “Mellon”, which if you know Pittsburgh history immediately pins down where his wealth came from. Mr Scaife and Mr Dickey and Clyde Slease formed a company called Calvary, Inc to hold the station license.

In 1999, the ownership report showed Mr Slease as having 100% voting control and ownership and control of the corporation – the current report shows Mr Scaife with 70% control,, Mr Slease with 20% control and Mr Dickey with 10%.

Mr Scaife (according to Forbes) is the #238 richest American – a bit over a billion dollars. He owns the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, which has become the Conservative alternative newspaper to the Pittsburgh Press/Post-Gazette. The Tribune gained some national publicity when the wife of John F’ing Kerry (Teresa Heinz Dont-call-me-Kerry) blurted out “Shove it” at their reporter when pushed to explain her remarks that Republicans were un-American
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/3576476/detail.html

Mr Scaife also funded the American Spectator and owns a substantial portion of NewsMax. He is a strong anti-communist and was a financial backer of Richard Nixon before Nixon imploded, and his mother was a friend of Barry Goldwater.

Mr Slease is an attorney in the Pittsburgh area who dabbles in public policy law Profile here but mostly seems to dabble in managing the various Mellon trusts

For bonus credit, which candidate did Scaife’s newspaper endorse in 2008?

Oh, and he’s the vice chairman of the Heritage Foundation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagKpy47oBQ
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html

I’m not suggesting anything about him other than you understand who in America may be pulling the strings that make things happen…