Richard Mellon Scaife

Richard Mellon Scaife (1932- ) is an American billionaire and newspaper publisher. He is principal heir to the Mellon oil, banking, aluminium, and uranium fortune. He is known for his financing of conservative public policy organisations through the foundations he controls, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, Allegheny Foundation, and (until 2001) the Scaife Family Foundation. Collectively, these are referred to as the Scaife Foundations.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation is a major funder of the pro-corporate think tank, the Hudson Institute. In the Foundation's annual report for 2006, it notes that it gave $200,000 to the Hudson Institute, and $800,000 to another conservative organisation, the Heritage Foundation.

Funding the New Right

In her article "Citizen Scaife", Karen Rothmyer argues that Richard Mellon Scaife has "used his immense wealth to shape today's political climate" in his role as "the prime funder of the media-savvy New Right". Rothmyer recounts Scaife's brief ownership of a publication with alleged CIA links:

Scaife's one foray into international publishing represents perhaps the most curious of his publishing enterprises. In 1973, he became the owner of Kern House Enterprises, a U.S.-registered company. Kern House ran Forum World Features, a London-based news agency that supplied feature material to a large number of papers around the world, including at one time about thirty in the U.S. Scaife abruptly closed down Forum in 1975, shortly before Time Out, a British weekly, published a purported 1968 CIA memorandum, addressed to then-director Richard Helms, which described Forum as a CIA-sponsored operation providing "a significant means to counter Communist propaganda." The Forum-CIA tie, which lasted into the seventies, has been confirmed by various British and American publications over the years, and it was confirmed independently by a source in connection with this article.

Affiliations

• Committee on the Present Danger (1976 version)
• Forum World Features
• Hudson Institute
• Kern House Enterprises
• Sarah Scaife Foundation
• Scaife Family Foundation
• Scaife Foundations

External resources

• Namebase SCAIFE RICHARD MELLON