'Liberal Media Bias' Inspires Launch of New Blog

America's most prominent media watchdog plans to launch its own blog on Tuesday with a goal of further exposing and combating the perceived liberal bias in the media.

Newsbusters.org is the latest project of the Media Research Center, which is also the parent organization of Cybercast News Service. The new blog will feature posts by some of the nation's most widely read experts on the issue of media bias, an issue that Michael Chapman, press secretary for the Media Research Center, said "is almost overwhelming."

"Thirty to 40 million viewers are getting news from sources with a liberal bias," Chapman said, referring to the "old media" such as broadcast network giants NBC, CBS, ABC and cable titan CNN.

"This is a huge audience when compared to, say, FOX," Chapman explained. Though such conservative pundits as Bill O'Reilly receive approximately 2.7 million viewers per night, according to Chapman, this is slight compared to the broadcast network news audiences, which reach "20 million people a night" with news that "is supposed to be objective reporting, not commentary."

Concentrating on the news media's treatment of the war, Supreme Court nominations and elections, the blog will seek to answer the question, "Where is the balanced coverage?"

Newsbusters.org hopes to fill a void in the blogosphere, Chapman said, despite the more than 60 million blogs that already exist, according to a report in May in the Blog Herald, an online publication that monitors the activities of blogs.

That number notwithstanding, "this is the first time ever than an established policy research organization has joined hands with some highly respected bloggers to create one site as the clearinghouse for liberal media bias," Chapman said.