Again, a significant majority of journalists polled by Pew (annually) openly consider themselves to be liberal. It can be argued that this bias doesn't come across in their work product but are you claiming that Chris Matthews is either neutral in that he ingratiates himself to whatever power that happens to be or even tilts right?

Personally I'm not entirely convinced that NPR necessarily tilts left as there was a study conducted a number of years ago that suggested they were actually fairly close to center based on the sources they used in their reporting. Fox apparently only tilts slightly right, and WSJ's news pages actually tilted slightly left.

For Fox News, their rise has only been relatively recent. CNN's massive fall has only been in the last couple years. Further, I would also suggest that the reason WSJ has been so successful is that markets depend on accurate information - and in this, removing bias in favor of details and content is important given their audience makes money on both sides of a trade. Whereas you might say New York Times' aims to influence decision makers, WSJ would attempt to inform them. Of course their editorials tend libertarian/conservative and quite openly so. I completely disagree that most newspaper op-eds tend conservative - particularly given it's the editors themselves who declare themselves as liberal.

However, getting away from bias from a moment, whatever you may think, unabashedly conservative talk radio has found success specifically because it found a rather large underserviced niche. If to you, this means that these people are extremist right wingers is irrelevant. Both the quickly growing audience base of Fox and conservative talk radio (and the failure of Air America) reflect the reality that there was a market that was largely underserviced - and that Air America did not meet that need - despite their medium. It was their underlying message/content that did not resonate.