Heritage Foundation To Launch ‘Straight-Down-The-Middle’ News Site

Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, gestures during a news conference on immigration reform Monday, May 6, 2013, in Washington. The Heritage Foundation presented a study that immigration legislation wou... Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, gestures during a news conference on immigration reform Monday, May 6, 2013, in Washington. The Heritage Foundation presented a study that immigration legislation would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion to provide government benefits for millions of people now living in the U.S. illegally. Supporters of the legislation call the study deeply flawed. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) MORE LESS
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The Heritage Foundation wants a piece of the digital news pie.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday that on June 3 the conservative think tank will launch the Daily Signal, a digital news website with a focus on “straight-down-the-middle journalism,” as Geoffrey Lysaught, the site’s publisher and Heritage Foundation’s vice president of strategic communications, put it.

The site will tackle politics and policy in same vein as Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, although Lysaught argues his site will tack a truly dispassionate tack.

“What Ezra is doing has got a wild liberal bias to it,” he told Businessweek. “When we talk about the news, we’re just laying out the facts. We think that’s an important educational mission.”

Objective journalism, however, won’t do much to advance the causes championed by the Jim DeMint-led think tank — like the effort to defund Obamacare that led to last fall’s government shutdown. So there will be an opinion section, Businessweek explains, where Heritage is “betting that these readers, attracted to the Daily Signal’s news, will find themselves persuaded by the conservative commentary and analysis that will draw on the think tank’s scholars and researchers.” The Daily Signal’s challenge will be making sure that division holds.

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