In the domestic Cold War a reporting gap has developed: a number of left-leaning web sites such as The Huffington Post and the TPM and Think Progress blog networks have sprung up to report as well as opine. They dig up documents, cover breaking news and help push stories that embarrass conservatives and Republicans into the mainstream. Conservatives can sound downright apoplectic when talking about their disadvantage, which comes on top of the fact that liberal journals of opinion have historically done more enterprise reporting than their conservative counterparts and what conservatives perceive as a liberal bias in the reporting of mainstream outlets like National Public Radio and The New York Times.

The first iteration of trying to close this gap—and the conservative deficit on the kind of cultural coverage and ideological heterodoxy easily found in liberal-leaning outlets like The Nation, Salon, and The New Republic—was a spate of start up web sites between 2008 and 2010. They had mixed success: Culture11, which set out to be a “conservative Slate,” quickly lost funding and shut down. The Next Right, a reformist and tech-savvy political strategy blog, has barely been updated since last year. Others, such as FrumForum.com, run by apostate former Bush speechwriter David Frum, have thrived in terms of readership if not income. Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, which supposedly set out to be a journalistic enterprise first and a conservative publication second, has seen those priorities largely reversed as it has promoted questionable evidence to support conservative views. Meanwhile Andrew Breitbart’s web sites have certainly pushed stories into the mainstream, but they have often later been discredited.

Meanwhile new non-profit organizations such as ProPublica and the American Independent News Network are doing investigative reporting that has no ideological orientation. Now, conservative think tanks are stepping in to fill the absence. At the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Media and Public Policy is looking to strengthen the reporting on its blog by hiring an investigative journalist. “Newspapers don’t have the money to invest in investigative units any more,” notes Mike Gonzalez, vice president of communications at Heritage, who oversees the reporting project. “More reporting is being done by think tanks and non-profits, mostly leftist organizations like Think Progress [of the Center for American Progress]. It’s time for a conservative organization to do the same thing, so why shouldn’t we do it?”

Rob Bluey, director of Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy, will supervise and edit the reporter. Bluey says that the reporter will write for the CMPP’s blog and probably contribute to conservative journals, as Bluey himself does. The CMPP generally publishes items, both reported and opinion, that bolster conservative policy positions. For instance, Bluey went to the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill and reported that the ensuing moratorium on offshore oil drilling was harming the local economy. “[Ideology] will be a driving factor in what we cover, issues of concern to Heritage,” says Bluey.

Bluey and Gonzalez were both unwilling to specify what issues they want to investigate. So it’s unclear whether their reporting will be mainly focused on trying to embarrass their ideological opponents or investigating the behavior of, say, corporations and government agencies, as many of the non-ideological foundations they point to as inspirations do.

Based on what they’ve done so far, though, their model seems to be something that splits the difference. The ideal CMPP item is one that uses reporting to correct what they see as liberal bias in the media by illuminating events or narratives that confirm conservative views. Bluey’s reporting on the Gulf is a case in point: while the mainstream media was focused on the ill effects of the oil spill, Bluey looked into the unintended consequences of the government’s response.

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Ben Adler is a contributing writer for The Nation. He previously covered politics, policy, and media as a staffer for Newsweek and Politico. His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, and New York, among other publications.