The Heritage Foundation debuted its “straight down-the-middle” news website, the Daily Signal, on Tuesday with an article authored by the right’s favorite mainstream journalist.
Sharyl Attkisson, the investigative reporter who left CBS News earlier this year reportedly over her frustrations with the network’s purported liberal bias, wrote a critical piece about government-funded medical research on premature babies.
As the Washington Post noted, Attkisson’s previous work on medical topics has been dubious, with experts criticizing her past reporting on supposed links between vaccines and autism.
Attkisson is a heroine among conservatives, many of whom consider her the rare member of the mainstream media willing to pursue right-wing obsessions like Benghazi and the Fast & Furious gun-running operation.
Attkisson, the author of a forthcoming book that details her frustrations with the Obama administration, suggested in April that the White House worked to prevent her stories from being aired by CBS. The same month, Attkisson suggested that liberal watchdog Media Matters may have been paid to specifically target her reporting.
CBS and Media Matters each repudiated the claims.
In the first of three interviews with the Daily Signal posted Tuesday on the website, Attkisson said she’s seeking “the opportunity to bring under-served stories to a broad audience through an editorial process that doesn’t censor, that doesn’t try to direct a story to go in a certain unnatural direction.”
She said the website has pledged to serve as a platform for stories like the one she authored on Tuesday.
“The Daily Signal promised to be a good outlet for an under-served story—in this case, the one about the baby oxygen trials—in a way that the story could naturally tell itself,” Attkisson, who will be a “senior independent contributor” for the site, said in the interview. “And in a fearless way because there are people who do want to shy away from these types of stories that are critical of government or powers that be. I think those are some of the most important stories that need to be told today.”
Heritage Foundation’s vice president of strategic communications Geoffrey Lysaught said last month that he envisions the Daily Signal to provide “straight down-the-middle-journalism.”
Does anyone other than TPM care what this bitch is doing?
Dang, I always get her mixed up with the other one.
Saw this earlier at Media Matters.
I guess she’s too old to fit in a slot at FOX.
What Sharrrrrrrrrrron Angle?
Oh good grief. What impulse does this “straight/balanced/unskewed” BS satisfy for conservatives? Is it that they are desperate to be “right” all the time and closed off to the potential for changes in view point? Do they need to convince themselves constantly that they aren’t consuming a completely inbred political ideology?