[TYPO3-RTE] Using rtehtmlarea in tt_news, <p> are stripped

[John Nicholas]

I am using rtehtmlarea 1.2 in typo3 3.8 with tt_news 2.2.24.

I have the RTE behaving pretty well for normal content and almost 
identically in tt_news except all my <p> tags are getting stripped out. 
I know that it goes in the database as line breaks but on the news pages 
  it is not adding the <p> tags back in. Works fine in regular content.

I've wasted a lot of hours and research but haven't been able to figure 
out why the behavior is different.