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I deleted, again, the libelous contention that the paper printed a story about the sexual orientation of a candidate's wife. There is absolutely no proof, including the newspaper's own library of stories, that this ever happened. It not only libels the woman, but also the paper's publisher.
This site has been warned several times about the nature of the lie being printed. When it continues to be published it becomes an actionable libel ("intentional lies"), and I believe both the candidate's wife AND the publisher of the newspaper have a good case against the editors and operators of this site.
Here's how the newspaper's competition covered the controversy. The author is a former reporter of a rural Greensburg paper owned by Scaife. That probably should have been disclosed when he wrote the piece. www.post-gazette.com/pg/04067/281739.stm
It goes to an article by Tom Randall that ran in 2003.
Randall is not, nor has he ever been, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He appeared only as an op-ed commentator, much as many prominent Democratic and Republican pundits are featured in the opinion section every Sunday. This is common not only to the two large Pittsburgh dailies, but every major newspaper in the country.
Randall is a policy analyst for the Capital Research organization in Washington, D.C. His work can be found at www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.asp?org=TIF100
I will continue to explain why printing "intentional lies" is tantamount to libel, in this case against both the politician's wife AND the publisher of the newspaper. I cannot be a plaintiff in this case, so do not consider this a legal threat. Rather, I am trying to explain why, professionally, I easily can say that printing the erroneous and unedited lie that the newspaper accused the wife of a political candidate of being a lesbian is libel.
Someone might continue to edit my words, but the facts don't change. Let's hope either the politician's wife or the owner of the newspaper never see that printed. unsigned comments from 147.72.93.199
Here are some claims that are not supported by evidence or details. Can someone find supporting references? Which awards has the paper won? How do we judge its "expanding influence?" Where did the editors make these statements, and which editors are we talking about? Who, what, where, when..... -Willmcw 23:53, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
References:
www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/business/s_295006.html
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ep/20050121/en_bpiep/tribunereviewpaperstoconsolidatejobsinpittsburghoffice
A simple google search would have brought up the numerous awards. Here are some listed by the newspaper itself, pre-2002:
www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/news/s_105337.html
www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/4111151/detail.html
Willmcw, you seem to have some kind of animus against this newspaper. Why would you cite the daily's decision to drop a columnist? Was that to make the paper seem racist? If you didn't know, the paper is in an exclusive Sunday distribution deal with the city's lone African-American weekly. The newspaper has won numerous awards for it's stories about racial justice, including landmark work by Mark Houser on discrimination against African-American jurors.
The Sunday opinion page is one of the largest in America. It has more liberal commentators than its competitor, which has a left-leaning section. Why not fault the paper for adding Mallard Fillmore, too?
As a Pittsburgh reader who was surprised to see so many oddities appearing about the paper and Scaife, I felt I should edit these entries for fairness.
No, I do not have an animus. If you recall, I posted two awards that the paper receveid and then you deleted them, saying you'd replace them with newer ones. Please do not delete referenced material from the article. If you have a reference showing that the paper has more liberal commentators than its competitor then you can add that information too. Running a column by Samuel Francis is not quite the same things as running Mallard Fillmore. The news is not that they dropped him, but that they ran him. However, if you want to include a list of all the comic strips and commentators, then that's all the better. Cheers, -Willmcw 00:48, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Dropping a columnist from an outside news outlet (he's not a Tribune-Review staffer) is not unusual. I counted the Sunday rolls and found 27 columnists -- about evenly divided between Conservative/Libertarian and left-leaning opinion makers and op-ed contributors, including Ramsey Clark. It seems you want to twist reality to make it something else, which is fine. I don't work for the newspaper. I'm just an informed reader. And I'll continue to delete the reference because it's snide and doesn't represent either the newspaper or the community it serves.
You call it "news," but even a simple scan of Lexis-Nexis and the Internet shows that it wasn't a big deal. In fact, you seem to rely for most of your "news" on a discredited account of the paper penned by Arianna Huffington, a woman who sought high office in California as a progressive and a critic noted for her unverified attacks on conservatives. If Huffington's opinion of the newspaper is newsworthy, then you don't seem to know much about journalism.
You are the same person, by the way, you kept insisting that the newspaper called Heinz Kerry a "lesbian." This is libel under Pennsylvania law, but that didn't stop you. In fact, when called about it, you kept printing it!
Of course, your libel was OK because you "signed" a "name" to it. Quite frankly, at this point you don't seem to have much credibility.
Come to think of it, you haven't told "us anything about the paper" except half truths and outright intentional lies that would be actionable in this jurisdiction (good thing I work for the competition, and not the Tribune-Review. I had no duty to turn you in).
You speak of "context," but you don't really seem to understand the term of art, or to apply it with any distinction. This is a hatchet job on the newspaper, the man who owns it and the community who reads it.
unsigned comments by 147.72.93.199
And practicing libel is a Wikipedia tactic? Fine. Maybe the internet community should begin to address the inherent problems of Wikipedia, and how uninformed "encyclopedia" pieces that violate libel law are "comprehensive."
Saying that a major American newspaper called a candidates wife is libel. It libels her, and it libels the paper. It's a baseless smear that was bandied about on this site for weeks. Rather than be ashamed of such behavior, you argue that, well, it libels no one now, so everything was OK. No, it's not OK.
I've forwarded this site to several journalism organizations so they can write about libel and lies in the age of cyberspace. Let the students tackle this as a learning experience. unsigned comments by 147.72.93.172
Yes, I'm sure journalism schools quickly integrate information into their curriculum sent to them by random people on the internet. A source for the information you have complained about has been provided. You have done nothing to dispute this source beyond making vague legal threats and generally acting in an uncivil manner. If you wish to be a genuine contributor, please act in a constructive manner instead of merely posting diatribes. Gamaliel 00:39, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Again, you erred terribly. I went to the Tribune-Review's internet archives. Francis has not appeared there since late 2003, and he only arrived on occasion. He was part of a package of authors the newspaper gets, mostly for the Sunday opinion section, that comes from Creators Syndicate. See www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=sfr.
Some of the other authors carried by Creators, and reprinted by the Tribune-Review (and most other major newspapers), include Alexander Cockburn and Molly Ivins on the left, and Bill O'Reilly and John STosell on the right, and the cartoon Andy Capp in the pub.
All continue to appear in the Tribune-Review, except Francis.
The ONLY reference I could find that it was controversial to use a list of writers from Creators was from an article by Max Blumenthal that was part of an "Alternet" attempt to distract from the DNC fallout. Since you truly believe that Alternet made a shrewd judgement, you might be interested to know that the Tribune-Review quit using Francis completely in late 2003, nearly a year before the election and nine months before the Democratic primary.
The same "source" you reference called the Tribune-Review editor "the political wife-beater" for conservatives. Some source.
Blumenthal began the lie that the "Tribune-Review was the only newspaper in America which publishes columns" by Francis. Unfortunately, that wasn't true. The newspaper had not carried the columnist in months, and when it did it used him only for specific discussions about Republican politics.
You smear by being selective, and, moreover, not factual. Five minutes of cursory research could have turned this up.
Again, welcome to the failure of Wikipedia as a meaningful medium. unsigned comments by 147.72.93.172
I love how you "cite" three "sources" who all say the same story. All you have to do is go to the Tribune-Review online archives. You can clearly see disgruntled letters to the editor, running in late 2003 and early 2004, calling for the return of Sam Francis as a Creators contributor. It seems fairly obvious to anyone, but not you, that the paper therefore dropped the sometimes column as early as 2003, long before the Kerry issue arose.
Ironically, you don't note that Blumenthal, Huffington and Alterman all share the source material (work by Conanson and Blumenthal) that doesn't appear to be correct.
So you single out the Tribune-Review for refusing to run one author in the Creator's syndicate (archives show they run the rest), and that 22 newspapers continue to publish Francis. You don't mention them, because you haven't done your homework. Just as you continued to spread the libel that the newspaper called Heinz Kerry a "lesbian." You don't seem to understand that "sources" might have motivations (in this case, hack political screeds against a daily newspaper) beyond recording the simple truth.
Again, you have failed to simply put fact to page. Typical, as Heinz Kerry would say. Typical. unsigned comments from 147.72.93.172
By the way, Willm, your errors have simply been lack of research and poor sourcing. Galamiel (or whatever his/her name is) have been intentional and verge on tortiary libel. Attempts to mark them as "intentional lies" (a very real concept) have been unsuccessful. I have sought outside help on this when outright libel was presented. It's too bad that this medium is at the mercy of people like that.
He didn't get the column from the Tribune-Review. The column appears online. Every citation I found shows letters to the editor in late 2003 and early 2004 asking why the Trib dropped him. The paper copies of the newspaper show no column on August 10 featuring Sam Francis.
Since it was a column that appeared very rarely in the newspaper anyway, it's been difficult to find exactly when it was dropped. But it seems to have been discontinued in late 2003 or early 2004, with little fanfare, long before it became an issue for pundits after the DNC.
Creators carries the Francis column free of charge on its website. That seems to be what the reader was mentioning.
By the way, the "editors" again blew an easily fact-checked "fact." You said Carl Prine was convicted of trespassing. You forgot (intentionally?) that he was found completely innocent on appeal. In Pennsylvania, District Magistrates can't really "convict" anyone. They're not even lawyers. All charges of a summary nature can be heard in a real court of law (Common Pleas in Allegheny County). There, his charges were brushed aside.
www.pittsburghlive.com/pages/pdf/ptr030404.pdf
Yeah, that would have been hard to check.
I believe that until we can say exactly when it was dropped, we should stay away from it, especially since there is no record of its existence after 2003 except a lone letter to the editor. Another letter in July of 2004, for example, uses the Francis name without the editor's reference at all to any of the writer's columns.
www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/s_82740.html
In fact, the only outside references to the entire issue seem to come from the same source, Max Blumenthal, albeit one reprinted on the Internet many times.
http://carapace.weblogs.us/archives/016213.html
It seems Blumenthal got it wrong.
The last Francis article I can find in the Trib never appeared online and was published on March 2, 2004. The only one I can find before that appeared on June 25, 2003, and there's an online record of that: www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/s_141477.html
So, while he "appeared" in the Tribune-Review, he seems to have surfaced once a year, and was never printed again after March 2, 2004. -unsigned by 147.72.93.199 00:28, Feb 17, 2005
After editing the business about Heinz Kerry, the more I dug up about Prine, the more I realized how unfair the accusation from the Philadelphia Weekly (the only source making the claim) was about his involvement in it.
I've cut it from the main board, but we can discuss whether it should be included or not. It seems like a dead end, and the vast majority of the evidence seems to point to the fact that Prine is a pretty damned good newsman, and a liberal:
The Tribune-Review's environmental and investigative reporter Prine also had written a piece mentioning that Heinz [4] and nearly 2,000 other landowners were receiving farmland property tax reductions, but never suggested she did so knowingly. Instead, the stories blamed lax enforcement by county officials and botched work by hired contractors for numerous mistakes in thousands of property assessments that hurt the environment, not helped it[5].
Prine, considered a liberal journalist within the Pittsburgh news community by many colleagues [6], was praised by Kerry's campaign for work that aided their attacks on President George W. Bush [7] and his stories continue to be employed by the Democratic leadership [8] and left-wing outlets, including The Nation, which has lauded his probes into coal mine safety [9] and chemical plant security [10].
Prine's investigations featured prominently in Robert F. Kennedy's damning assault on the GOP's environmental record, "Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy [11]."
Kennedy advised the Kerry campaign on environmental policies.
Although attacked following the Heinz Kerry spat by one alternative press outlet as "unprofessional" [12], Prine was singled out by the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review "as a model of dogged reporting for the rest of the press" only days before the election. [13].
It later surfaced that the author of the piece calling Prine "unprofessional," Steve Volk, had himself been turned down for a job by the Tribune-Review. He also had worked for the Democratic leadership in Pittsburgh, facts he didn't disclose to his readers.
"Little known fact: Volk, a former lackey in the Mayor Murphy administration, was once seen in the Trib offices dressed for a job interview. Later, he would devote countless inches of his media column and appear on a local cable talk show to bash the Trib. I was even the target of one of his rants when he got upset that I had been tipped off about a court hearing and the Post-Gazette reporter hadn't," wrote Pittsburgh media personality Dave Copeland. [14]
Others in the alternative press had long pointed to Volk's paper as a "slanderous" tabloid that had mistreated employees [15] and stooped to libeling both the living and the dead[16], sometimes using bogus letters [17][18], doctored photographs [19] [20] and shoddy reporting [21] to defame celebrities, business owners and other public figures, including journalists at the local Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. [22].
At one point, former Philadelphia mayor and Heinz Kerry ally Rendell called for the firing of Volk's editor for cheap attacks and poor news judgement [23]. Rendell was flatteringly portrayed as a champion of the environment and Pennsylvania taxpayers by Prine [24]. -unsigned by 147.72.93.172 19:39, Feb 18, 2005
We do not know your name. Please provide a name at the end of your comments. If you continue to wish to be anonymous, for whatever reason, then you are welcome to use an anonymous name. It is becoming very difficult for the other editors of this article to communicate with you, and especially hard for others to identify your words.
Despite your repeated references to "Wikipedia norms," you are not showing an interest in following those norms yourself. They are well documented at such pages as Help:Editing and specifically Wikipedia:Talk page. We still ask that anonymous contributors, who, for whatever reason, decide not to create a personalized account, still follow such norms so that interactions with them can be structured and cohesive.
The voicing of legal threats against Wikipedia, or of any of its members in their capacities and actions as editors and contributors, is not conducive to the open collaborative spirit of the project. The consensus is that such threats of legal action are not allowed. Your repeated accusations of "tortiary libel" etc. do appear to be legal threats, certainly at least legal accusations. Wikipedia:No legal threats, as a policy which has become accepted convention, stipulates that if an individual makes legal threats against the project or its members, that such individuals shall not contribute to the project until any legal action is resolved or the threat of legal action has disappeared. In the interests of the project, administrators can take measures to prevent you from contributing in such a situation.
You appear to have content dispute issues over this article that so far do not appear to have clear evidence or references to support them. Furthermore, you seem to insist on the falsity of content based on the lack of evidence to support them. Certainly, lack of evidence does not imply lack of truth (an example of the fallacy of negative proof), and we hope you recognize that.
Please provide excerpts and links to reliable sources which can reinforce your positions. This and only this can provide Wikipedia with what it needs to make decisions about its content.
Regards, Keith D. Tyler ¶ [AMA] 01:04, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)