PITTSBURGH—Just over 50 years ago, Richard Mellon Scaife did something both his friends and critics thought was just a vanity project to promote his conservative ideals when he bought the Greensburg Tribune-Review, a small Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, newspaper with a circulation of 35,000—at a time when the industry was in its early years of decline.
In 1974, just four years after Scaife bought the paper, he once again did the opposite of what his friends and critics thought possible and called for then-President Richard M. Nixon to be impeached with an above-the-fold editorial that read: “Stand aside immediately as President.”
Just two years earlier, Scaife—the principal heir to the vast Mellon family banking fortune—had contributed more than $1 million to Nixon’s reelection campaign.
The Tribune-Review editorial went on to opine: “We are…
