Former Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin launches own online channel

Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has started her own subscription-based online network, as she bids to circumvent an overactive mainline media and connect directly with the audience.

The Sarah Palin Channel, an internet television channel, which went live on Sunday, will act as a "direct connection" between the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate and her supporters, with "no need to please the powers-that-be," Palin said in a video mission statement on her channel's home page.

"Are you tired of the media filters?" she asks. "Well, I am. I always have been. So we're gonna do something about it. We'll talk about the issues that the mainstream media won't talk about."

The internet TV network will work as a ''community'' on the lines of social media networks, although on a limited scale, where, for a subscription fee of $9.95 a month or $99.95 a year. Users can post footage to the site, send Palin their own questions and, check out a blog edited by Bristol Palin, her 24-year-old daughter.

Palin, 50, oversees all content posted to the channel, including her own political commentary. Subscribers can submit questions to Palin and participate in online video chats with her.

Sarah Palin says it is not that she is uncomfortable with her status as one of America's most watchable celebrities, which she actually enjoys, but she is concerned about the status quo of information and politics in the US.

Since joining John McCain's presidential campaign as a virtually unknown former governor of Alaska six years ago, Palin, with her good looks and channel rating also had earlier landed in a spot at Fox News.

''We'll go directly to the root of the problems confronting America,'' she says in the video clip. ''We'll talk about the issues that the mainstream media won't talk about. We'll look at the ideas that I think Washington doesn't want you to hear.''

To drive home her point, Palin, in a separate post on Facebook, has directly attacked The Washington Post, which she says has "fallen like a lead balloon" since the days of writing about the Watergate scandal.

"Whereas you once doggedly covered the 18.5 minute gap in Nixon's White House communications, you've virtually ignored the Obama Administration's 1.2 million minutes of deleted communications by just one of the agencies under Obama's executive branch," she writes.

Palin says her new web site is a response to mainstream media outlets dodging important issues and slanting coverage.

Obviously, Palin feels there is a vacuum between her and her conservative audience that stands in the way of her getting accepted.

In short, she'll dictate terms at her own internet television network.