A Few Things To Remember Upon Reading Colin McNickle's PSO Fingerwag

This blogpost appeared on the "Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony" facebook page a day or so ago.

It's a point by point analysis of this column by my BFF Colin McNickle over at the Trib (Hey, Colin.  How ya doin'?  Nice to see you're still writing, what with your newspaper collapsing around you like a  papier-mâché globe left out in the rain. Good for you.)

I wouldn't want to change anything about the post from the Mask of the Flower Prince, that's not the point of this post.

I'd want to add something my PSO friends might want to see regarding Colin's column.

The clue is found in this passage:

“Over the last five fiscal years, 2011 through 2015, the underlying problem of operating revenue falling well short of covering operating expenses has seen little or no improvement,” say Jake Haulk, the Allegheny Institute's president, and Frank Gamrat, the institute's senior research associate.

Longtime readers of this blog will know where I'm going with this. Newer readers might not.

I'll go back seven years to this blogpost of mine. After noticing that Mediamatters said that the Allegheny Institute was "closely related" to Richard Mellon Scaife, I wrote:

I read that and I thought, "How closely?" So I looked at Mediamatters' funding page for the Institute.

The page shows $ 4,596,700 in just 7 donors from 1995. Three of those donors are foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife (Sarah Scaife, Carthage and Allegheny Foundations). Those three foundations have given $3,996,000 to the Allegheny Institute since 1995.

If all these numbers are correct, then that means that about 87% of the money granted to the Allegheny Institute came directly from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife.

And in case you didn't already know it, my new PSO friends, Richard Mellon Scaife owned the Tribune-Review, the very same newspaper where Colin McNickle published that column on your strike.

It's simply a conflict of interest anytime the paper republishes anything from Jake Haulk and/or the Allegheny Institute, without also disclosing the financial interest the (now former) owner of the paper had with the local conservative think tank.

It's incestuous enough to discredit whatever's being said.