ST. PAUL -- The Huffington Post sponsored a luncheon panel today with right-leaning members of the both new and old media to discuss the "how the new media are impacting the '08 race." Moderating the panel was the MSNBC team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, whose guidance of the discussion allowed for debates on which medium is operating as better "gatekeepers" of the truth and which side (liberal or conservative) has more vicious commenters.

Noting that the pace of new media is constant, Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund said that the "new media makes it more difficult for conventional wisdom to take hold," since bloggers are constantly questioning and debating what the old media prints. At the same time, noted Fund, too many of the new media rely on old media's reporting and don't do enough of it themselves. What this has led to is a devaluation of investigative journalism, agreed most on the panel.

Yet conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham and columnist Tony Blankley both said that it was the failures of the old media that led to the rise of the blogosphere. "Old media blew it," said Ingraham. "The free market does work." Blankley cited Dan Rather and the "60 Minutes" memos as evidence that the nature of the blogosphere allows it to constantly self-correct, what Blankley referred to as "horizontal" fact-checking.

In the case of Rather, said Blankley, a handful of bloggers had managed to deconstruct the memo story between the time the story aired and the next morning.

But the new media's impact on the 2008 election isn't just in what role bloggers play. As Arianna Huffington noted, "Barack Obama could not have been the nominee were it not for the Internet," referring to the campaign's online fundraising success.

There are downsides to all this, however. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan compared the Internet to "walking into Bedlam [insane asylum] in the 1880s with a megaphone and asking, 'Does anybody have anything to say?'" Panelists remarked on the vitriol within new media, especially in the often-anonymous comments section of many sites.

But just as much of that vitriol originates on the left -- an "intolerance", as Tucker Carlson called it -- it is the left which dominates the new media. Political consultant Frank Luntz said, "There is no 18-to-24-year-old presence on the Right in new media."