Richard Scaife Acquires Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Building Conservative Media Infrastructure

Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and aluminum fortune, purchased the Tribune-Review newspaper in Greensburg, Pennsylvania for approximately $5 million in 1970, marking his entry into media ownership as part of a broader strategy to build conservative infrastructure across multiple domains. The acquisition represented one of the earliest implementations of the Powell Memorandum’s call for conservatives to establish independent media outlets that could counter what they viewed as liberal bias in mainstream journalism. Scaife would later expand the Tribune-Review’s operations into Pittsburgh itself, essentially creating a new newspaper that would serve as a conservative alternative to the established Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Tribune-Review was based in Greensburg, the county seat of Westmoreland County, located about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Prior to Scaife’s acquisition, it was a relatively modest regional newspaper. Under Scaife’s ownership, the paper would maintain editorial positions aligned with conservative movement priorities and provide sympathetic coverage to conservative politicians and causes. Scaife’s investment in the newspaper proved costly—he would subsidize the Tribune-Review’s operations with hundreds of millions of dollars from his family fortune over subsequent decades, treating it more as a political project than a profit-making enterprise.

Scaife’s disillusionment with Richard Nixon appears to have provided the impetus for his interest in both conservative philanthropy and media ownership. His experience with Nixon, according to several associates, persuaded him to invest his hopes and his money in conservative institutions and ideas rather than individual politicians. The Tribune-Review acquisition came at the beginning of this strategic shift, coinciding with Scaife’s increased philanthropic investments in think tanks and policy organizations.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Scaife expanded the Tribune-Review’s reach, eventually establishing a Pittsburgh edition that competed directly with the established Post-Gazette. The newspaper became known for its aggressive conservative editorial stance and its willingness to investigate stories that mainstream media outlets avoided or approached differently. The Tribune-Review would later play a significant role in promoting stories critical of the Clinton administration, including extensive coverage of the Whitewater controversy and other Clinton-related scandals.

Scaife’s media ownership complemented his broader strategy of building conservative movement infrastructure. While he was investing hundreds of millions of dollars in think tanks like the Heritage Foundation ($23 million between 1975-1998), the American Enterprise Institute, and the Federalist Society, he simultaneously controlled a media outlet that could publicize and promote the ideas these institutions developed. This integration of intellectual production (think tanks) and message distribution (media) exemplified the comprehensive approach to conservative institution-building that would characterize Scaife’s philanthropic and business activities.

The Tribune-Review under Scaife’s ownership maintained close relationships with conservative movement leaders and organizations. The newspaper provided favorable coverage to Heritage Foundation policy proposals, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) initiatives, and conservative political candidates. This symbiotic relationship between Scaife’s media property and his philanthropic investments created a reinforcing ecosystem where conservative ideas could be developed in think tanks, promoted through media coverage, and then implemented by politicians who received favorable treatment from Scaife-funded institutions.

Scaife’s willingness to sustain substantial financial losses operating the Tribune-Review demonstrated his commitment to conservative media infrastructure as a long-term political investment rather than a commercial venture. By the 2000s, Scaife had invested an estimated $300 million of his personal fortune to subsidize the newspaper’s operations. This financial commitment ensured that the Tribune-Review could compete with larger, established media outlets in the Pittsburgh market despite lacking comparable advertising revenue or circulation.

The Tribune-Review acquisition in 1970 marked the beginning of what would become a comprehensive conservative infrastructure-building project spanning media, think tanks, legal organizations, and political advocacy groups. Scaife would eventually direct an estimated $620 million toward “influencing American public affairs” according to his own accounting, with more than $1 billion total in philanthropic giving when adjusted for inflation. The Washington Post would later call him “the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century,” while Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III described him as “the unseen hand” of the conservative movement.

The model Scaife pioneered with the Tribune-Review—wealthy conservatives owning media outlets as political projects rather than commercial enterprises—would be replicated by other conservative donors in subsequent decades. This approach ensured that conservative perspectives had dedicated media platforms even when they might not be commercially viable, creating an institutional advantage that complemented conservative dominance in talk radio and later in cable news through Fox News.