While the defense and economics groups funded by Scaife court the news media and, by the very nature of what they do, attract coverage, Scaife has also shown himself to be interested in groups that specifically produce or scrutinize news or try to affect the newsgathering process itself. Contributions in this area do not approach those going to the other two areas; but they are substantial, and growing.

Some insight into the thinking of Scaife's advisers regarding the media is provided by George Mair, formerly of the Foundation for American Communications. "They always wanted me to tell them about how things work at CBS," Mair recalls. "They seemed fascinated by the media and loved to hear all the gossip. But, at the same time, they had a conspiratorial view of how the media work."

To date, FACS has received more than $700,000 from Scaife inducing about 20 percent of its current $650 000 budget. According to FACS president Jack Cox Scaife remains the organization's single largest donor. Besides sponsoring conferences which have been attended by close to 500 journalists, FACS runs seminars for nonprofit organizations and businesses on how to deal with the media. Cox estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 executives have attended these sessions. FACS also sends a newsletter free to about 6,000 people, including the op-ed editors of all metropolitan dailies and all news directors of commercial radio and television stations.

Recent events sponsored by FACS include an April seminar for business executives cosponsored by the UCLA Graduate School of Management (itself the recipient of a $1 million grant from the Sarah Scaife Foundation three years ago), and a December conference for journalists on nuclear energy cosponsored by the Gannett Newspaper Foundation.

Jack Scott, president of the foundation, describes FACS as ''a balanced organization" with no perceptible bias. "Cox is a conservative; there's no blinking at that," Scott says. But he is very reluctant to project his political opinions. I don't think that as an organization they have a philosophy."

Llewelyn King, publisher of The Energy Daily, based in Washington D C was a panelist at the December nuclear conference. He says that he believes that the reporters at that conference, whom he describes as having come, by and large, from small papers, ''would have liked to have heard more from people opposed to nuclear power.'' At the same time, he says, "I don't think anybody got brainwashed.''

Michael Rounds, a business reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who attended a FACS seminar on economics last year, says, ''I felt it was very well done. Where else would I get a chance to meet Paul Samuelson?'' He adds, 'I saw it as business-supported - that's why I went. The economists weren't what I would call liberals. The organizers were trying to educate a bunch of journalists like me, trying to give them and me a sense of how business works and to deal with perceived anti-business bias.''

Education of journalists is also a part of the work of another Scaife-backed media group, the Washington-based Media Institute. The institute's president, Leonard S. Theberge, also was a founder of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, the umbrella group for six conservative legal groups funded by Scaife. Institute board members have included Herbert Schmertz, vice president, public affairs, of Mobil, and S. Robert Fluor, chairman of Fluor Corporation. Scaife's assistance began with a $100,000 donation in 1975, the first year of the institute's existence, and is around $150,000 this year, or about 15 percent of the budget.

Frank Skrobiszewski, second in command to Theberge, describes the main objective of the Media Institute as being "to improve the quality of economic reporting, particularly on network television." To this end, the institute has published, for example, a study of television news that concludes that the networks have increased the public's fear of nuclear power. It also runs lunch seminars for journalists and puts out a newsletter.

The institute's newest project is the Economic Communications Center, which began operating last October. Its purpose, according to Skrobiszewski, is to provide journalists with quick analyses of current economic issues and easy access to experts in the field. '' For example, when news comes out on something like the wage-price index, we can have an analysis prepared in one-and-a-half to two hours and have an economist ready to discuss it,', Skrobiszewski explains. "Journalists often complain that they have no one to go to outside of government. This closes that gap.'' Skrobiszewski cites as an example of the center's quick acceptance the fact that its analysis of Iranian assets prompted interviews with the expert who prepared it by, among others, ABC, the AP, and UPI.

Scaife's funding not only makes possible a critical scrutiny of television programs; it also helps to create programs. Between 1976 and 1977, Scaife entities supplied $225,000 (the second-largest grant after Mobil) to WGBH, the Boston public broadcasting station, for a series that examined topics including the CIA, defense, and foreign policy. Scaife later supplied $110,000 in pre-production grants for a series on intelligence issues, based on a script by former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, now a top official at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. According to Peter McGhee, WGBH program manager for national productions, the series currently is in limbo because only half of the needed $2 million has been raised. He says he is unsure how much of that, if any, was pledged by Scaife.

Closer to Pittsburgh, Scaife supplied $500,000 to public television station WQLN in Erie, Pennsylvania, to help underwrite Free to Choose, a ten-part series featuring Milton Friedman.

On the print side, Scaife has helped to underwrite a number of magazines In the past decade, for example, Scaife has given more than $1 million to the publishers of The American Spectator, a monthly whose views range across the conservative spectrum.

The most prestigious of the periodicals with which Scaife has been associated is Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Three years ago, Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian who is now a member of the National Security Council staff, approached Daedalus with a proposal for a special issue on U.S. defense policy, with himself as guest editor. Pipes also provided a proposed backer, in the form of a Scaife charity that was willing to put up $25,000 immediately and $25,000 to $50,000 later.

Pipes was keenly interested in defense policy, having been chairman of the so-called B-team, a group of ten out side experts convened by George Bush while Bush was CIA chief to make an assessment of Soviet military strength. The B-team conclusions, delivered in late 1976, included an estimate of Soviet defense spending that was twice as high as previous government estimates and an assertion that the Russians were bent on nuclear superiority. The conclusions, which were widely accepted as official, played a major role in shaping the current defense debate.

The Daedalus project proposed by Pipes was agreed to, but funding was sought from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to provide balance to the Scaife donation, and the issue of Pipes's editorship was left unresolved. As the essays began to come in, according to one source close to the project, it became evident that many were "under the influence of Pipes and the B-team mentality. It became clear that this was to be the B-Team's riposte to earlier liberal critics." Eventually, it was agreed that the project would have a board of advisers but no guest editor.

At some point following that decision, Scaife withdrew from the agreement to supply additional funds and insisted that the Scaife name not be associated with the project. Stephen R. Graubard, Daedalus's editor, says his recollection is that Scaife aides were unhappy about several things, especially a time delay in the publication of what turned out to be two special issues, Fall and Winter 1980. ''They never said Pipes had to be guest editor or we'll take our marbles and go home," Graubard says. Others recall things differently. A second source close to the project says, ''The Scaife people said their understanding was that Pipes was to be the sole guest editor and strongly implied bad faith. They were, in effect, trying to dictate what was to be in the magazine. They wanted to give the cold-war hard line."

In the end it is difficult to say what lessons, if any, can be drawn from the story of Richard Mellon Scaife and his activities While such a recounting. suggests that journalists should treat the rich and their creations the -foundations the trusts, the charitable organizations - with as much curiosity and skepticism as they treat government and political groups, the fact is that the size of Scaife's fortune and the narrowness of his interests make him unusual, if not unique.

Beyond this, the fact that Scaife - virtually unnoticed - has been able to establish group after group whose collective effect has been to help shape the way Americans think about themselves and their nation's problems raises a concern addressed by Walter Lippmann nearly sixty years ago. ''On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing," Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion. "As congenital amateurs our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has brought into the argument.''

By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give a friendly hearing, Scaife has helped to create an illusion of diversity where none exists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard from at all.

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