Billionaire Phil Anschutz (photo at left) has moved a step forward in his quest to give San Francisco a conservative newspaper by hiring Washington Times writer and Fox News analyst Bill Sammon (right) as the Examiner chain’s White House correspondent. The news release from the Examiner didn’t say whether Sammon would be doing straight reporting, opinion columns or both. The left-wing Media Matters group has collected a number of articles and video clips where Sammon expresses his opinions, including one from Monday where he said the Cheney shooting incident was a “tempest in a teapot” spawned by a media “feeding frenzy.” Sammon has been quoted as saying that Christian journalists bring “a basic moral compass” to their work “that the mainstream media possesses but just so often chooses to ignore. And if you bring that to your work, it will help you when you choose the stories you’re going to write about or broadcast … That moral compass will allow you to connect with mainstream America in a way that the mainstream media is not doing right now.” [Memo from Jim Romenesko of Poynteronline.org]