The Heritage Foundation has something to say to you about something they’re starting on my birthday:

We know you’re busy. And we’re quite certain you care deeply about the future of our country.

We care, too. We care about your communities, your families, and how Washington’s decisions are going to impact you.

More and more people are grabbing bites of news from mobile devices on the go – and they need a place where they can find digestible, trusted news on the most important policy debate of the day.

That’s why the Heritage Foundation team is excited to announce that we’re creating a digital-first, multimedia news platform.

After months of planning, on June 3 we will be repositioning and relaunching The Foundry as The Daily Signal. We will provide policy and political news as well as conservative commentary and policy analysis – in a fresh, visually rich, readable format for your desktop, tablet or phone.

We are committed to news coverage that is accurate, fair and trustworthy. As we surveyed the media landscape, it became clear to us that the need for honest, thorough, responsible reporting has never been more critical. That’s a challenge in today’s fast-moving world. And it’s a challenge we’re willing to accept.

We are dedicated to developing a news outlet that cuts straight to the heart of key political and policy arguments – not spin reported as news.

The Daily Signal is supported by the resources and intellectual firepower of Heritage – a dedicated team of experienced journalists to cover the news and more than 100 policy experts who can quickly help put issues in perspective. We believe this combination of news, commentary and policy analysis will establish The Daily Signal as a trusted source on America’s most important issues. …

Why is The Heritage Foundation undertaking this mission? We believe that high-quality, credible news reporting on political and policy issues is of paramount importance to an informed and free society. This is a reflection of that Jeffersonian notion that the greatest defense of liberty is an informed citizenry.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek analyzes:

Now Heritage has a new plan to exert its influence and, its leaders hope, win converts to the cause. On June 3 it will begin publishing the Daily Signal, a new digital news site whose primary focus will be straight reporting. “We came to the realization that the mainstream media had really abdicated the responsibility to do the news and do it well,” says Geoffrey Lysaught, vice president of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, who will also serve as publisher. The site aims to rectify the conservative perception that mainstream news slants to the left. “We plan to do political and policy news,” says Lysaught, “not with a conservative bent, but just true, straight-down-the-middle journalism.”

How does this help Heritage? The Daily Signal will also publish an opinion section aimed at a younger audience that isn’t thumbing through the editorial pages of theWall Street Journal. 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 past few years have seen a profusion of conservative media outlets, with titles such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart News joining standbys like National Reviewand the Weekly Standard. Although their content varies from red meat to sober policy analysis, all are aimed at fellow conservatives. “You often sense there’s an element of preaching to the choir,” says Katrina Trinko, a well-regarded political reporter lured away from National Review to manage the Signal’s news team. “What appealed to me was that our goal is not just to reach that audience. Obviously, we hope conservatives will come. But we hope anyone interested in information and public debate will see us as a trusted news source.”

Another way the Daily Signal plans to distinguish itself from its brethren on the right is through the quality of the reading experience. Conservative sites tend to be plagued by annoying pop-under ads and poor design. Heritage hired Atlantic Media Strategies, the digital consultancy behind the elegant financial site Quartz, to design the Daily Signal for phones and tablets. “We thought Heritage could really own the knowledge niche of smart conservatives and designed it with their media habits in mind,” says Ory Rinat, AMS’s director of strategy and partnerships. The site will be organized around what Rinat calls “passion points,” trending topics that will inform the editorial focus as well as reflect the obsessive way in which the target audience of Capitol Hill staffers, policymakers, journalists, and activists ingest political news. Because the Daily Signal is fully underwritten by Heritage, ads won’t clutter the experience.

The Daily Signal’s clean design, mobile-first approach, and claim of journalistic dispassion suggest obvious similarities to Ezra Klein’s new site, Vox, and Nate Silver’s refurbished fivethirtyeight.com. “Like Vox and 538, we’re purposely branding ourselves not as a blog but a standalone site,” says Robert Bluey, who directs Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy and will be the Signal’s editor-in-chief. But Lysaught is leery of the comparison. “What Ezra is doing has got a wild liberal bias to it,” he says. “When we talk about the news, we’re just laying out the facts. We think that’s an important educational mission.”

As Lysaught’s derision implies, Heritage rejects the idea that the mainstream media impartially purveys straight news. Yet trying to build a respectable alternative is a recognition of the media’s power and addresses the main flaw of overtly partisan outlets such as Fox News: They’re easily ignored and ridiculed outside conservative circles.

Heritage wants to build a large audience of its own. But with an editorial staff of about a dozen, it can’t reach everyone or supplant the New York Times. Instead it will focus on stories its editors believe the media is neglecting or misconstruing and thereby try to shape mainstream coverage. “A lot of the traditional media, they’re lazy,” says Lysaught. “When they get up in the morning, they’re looking for what’s already working. I think they’ll look to us. We want to be the place where the news gets its news, drive that news narrative by identifying real stories, doing the homework, and let those guys run with the work we’ve already done.”

Heritage staff offer examples including the Internal Revenue Service audits of political groups; the recent Supreme Court case Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, which touched on religious liberty issues; and the emerging debate about Common Core academic standards. Bluey notes that Heritage’s current blog, the Foundry, produced a steady stream of negative stories about Debo Adegbile, Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division, that eventually led to front-page coverage in the Washington Post. Adegbile’s nomination later failed in the Senate. That story is the model for how Heritage, without taking an overtly conservative position, can nonetheless inject its worldview into the mainstream press.

There is, of course, a tension at the heart of any enterprise purporting to offer straight news while also advancing a partisan agenda. Heritage has denounced plans to legalize undocumented immigrants. Will the Daily Signal offer a credible brief for supporters if House Speaker John Boehner summons the nerve to move ahead with immigration reform? Or will its coverage slant toward DeMint’s position?

Given the Heritage Foundation’s conservative mission, achieving mainstream credibility will be a tall order, especially because Heritage has come to be associated with outspoken purists such as Cruz. Trinko promises a strict divide between news and opinion of the kind that’s standard in traditional newspapers. But it will take more than that to win over those who aren’t already in their camp.

Left out of the BusinessWeek story is how this will be funded. Heritage is a nonprofit, but all enterprises, whether or not they pay income taxes, need to bring in more money than they spend. That is why Right Wisconsin charges for access to its web site.

The issue of media bias is complicated. Media people like to claim they have no bias, and no one on the right believes them. (Meanwhile, lefties claim the media is biased in favor of conservatives, which is absurd.) Even those who claim no political bias nonetheless favor incumbent politicians, whatever unit or department of government they cover, or whatever beat they cover. So incumbents get much more ink than their challengers, and news stories rarely ask if some problem brought before government really requires government to fix it. The goal should not be to eliminate bias, because that’s impossible with human beings; the goal should be to be fair and complete, including points of view that contrast with conventional wisdom.

Even on the political right there are more traditional conservatives, neoconservatives, “paleoconservatives” (Pat Buchanan), the tea party movement (however that’s defined) and conservatarians, with web sites of varying quality for each. Free-market conservatives tend to favor immigration and a less hard-line stance on illegal immigration, but that’s probably not a mainstream conservative position now.

The Daily Signal is worth doing simply if it improves the quality of the product. Too many right wing sites have advertisers that fit into favorite conspiracy theories that are far off mainstream. Any newspaper publisher would tell you that an advertiser has the right to advertise whatever legal products or services the advertiser wishes. (Assuming the advertiser pays, that is.) A mainstream audience isn’t likely to be attracted to a publication that advertises converting all your money into gold, or buying canned goods to prepare for Obama’s future invasion of your town, or whatever jumps past the line between possible and paranoid. And let’s hope the Daily Signal looks normal, as opposed to what graphic designers come up with to look “edgy” because they think their audience values illegibility.

Meanwhile, the least surprising news of the day comes from All Access (caps are theirs) which reports that the Federal Communications Commission …

… rejected challenges by liberal activist SUE WILSON and MEDIA ACTION CENTER to the license renewals of JOURNAL Talk WTMJ-A/MILWAUKEE and CLEAR CHANNEL (CAPSTAR TX LLC) Talk WISN-A/MILWAUKEE, based on the stations’ refusal to grant them equal time to respond to comments made on the air in support of Republican WISCONSIN Governor SCOTT WALKER.  The decision noted that the complaints went to programming choices rather than First Amendment claims, and that “the Commission cannot exercise any power of censorship over broadcast stations with respect to content-based programming decisions.”  The challengers also claimed that the ZAPPLE doctrine requires equal time when a spokesperson for a candidate appeared on the air, but the Commission responded that the ZAPPLE doctrine was dependent on enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine, which is no longer in effect.

This is an old complaint that had virtually no chance of success in a country with the First Amendment in it. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished because instead of encouraging opposing views to be aired, the Fairness Doctrine prevented controversial views from being aired. And in a world with the Internet, even the concept behind the Fairness Doctrine is irrelevant anymore. Don’t like Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling? Start your own website.

The public interest is not served when the government acts as censor.