I was delighted to see that one of the best-attended sessions at the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting here in Miami was that on "New Media: The Power of the Blogs". Introduced by TechCentralStation editor Nick Shulz, the first speaker was Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine, which led the exposure of Dan Rather over the fake Bush service report. He surprised me by predicting that in just a few years, more people will be reading their newspapers online than on paper, but he's probably right.

And of course more information is getting to people through blogs and other media. What role remained for mainstream media (MSM) now, he asked?

His answer: probably they need to concentrate on what they are supposed to do - unbiased news - and let the bloggers get on with opinions. But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies pointed out that in many parts of the world - Iraq and Lebanon, for instance - where it is hard for Western journos to penetrate, local bloggers can reflect reality with much more precision than the MSM, who can only work through official sources.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics observed that the rise of the blogosphere had produced a big loss of heft on the left. MSM articles are no longer taken at face value, so their left-wing bias (he was talking about the US media: in Britain we don't have any of that, of course) (ha ha) is less effective. And a cheering point for the right: the older generation may still be reading their news on paper, but it is younger folk who are online. In the war of ideas, in other words, the right has the winning troops, and they are fitter for the long fight.