Right-Wing Attacks on the Kerrys

Self-righteous conservatives have been up in arms about Teresa Heinz Kerry's "shove it" statement to a reporter from Pittsburgh's notorious Tribune-Review. I say "self-righteous" because they were eager to excuse worse comments from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Why, though, is the rest of the media focusing only on Kerry and not the paper itself?

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer:

Years before her first husband’s death in 1991, Teresa Heinz came to feel that Mr. Scaife had misused his newspaper to punish her and her husband for dissenting from right-wing Republican orthodoxy. Since her marriage to John Kerry in 1995, the hostility of the Scaife press and the outfits funded by Scaife foundations toward her has been nothing short of vicious.

A few days after the Massachusetts Senator and his wife celebrated their second Christmas together, the Tribune-Review ran a column suggesting that Mr. Kerry had been enjoying a "very private" relationship with another woman. There was no byline on the story and no evidence to support the salacious insinuation. There was nothing to it, in fact, except pure malice.

Last spring, a Scaife-funded "research group" sent out a study that accused her of covertly financing violent radicals of various kinds, including Islamists, through the straitlaced Heinz foundations that she controls. There was absolutely no basis for that tale—as the right-wing sleuths could have learned by making a single phone call. The Heinz money they had "traced" through a San Francisco group had actually gone in its entirety to support anti-pollution projects in Pennsylvania.

They’ve also been at the forefront of attacks on John Kerry:

When fresh accusations about her husband’s fidelity erupted earlier this year in the right-wing press, Ms. Heinz Kerry could scarcely have been surprised that the smear’s most eager purveyors included Internet sites financed by Mr. Scaife and his family foundations. Those "news sources" have also impugned Mr. Kerry’s patriotism, maligned his military service and distorted his voting record. They happen to be operated by the same discredited scribblers who once tried to convince America that Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers and drug smugglers.

I have subscribed to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and can tell you that it isn’t much of a paper — not to mention the fact that their delivery service is the worst I’ve ever encountered. It’s little more than a propaganda rag for the lunatic fringe of American conservatism masking as journalism and news reporting. For some reason, though, real journalists are covering for them by ignoring the paper’s history with the Kerrys and with attacks on liberals generally.

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