Three weeks into their latest round of Netbashing, editors at The
New York Times on Friday reduced the Gray Lady's front page to
an exercise in Daliesque surrealism, where paranoid speculation
and unsupported allegations can be ironically referred to as
"reporting." We're talking, of course, about the Christopher
Wrenpenned screed "A Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the
Internet," which rose to new heights of absurdity with each
successive paragraph. At one point, Wren the reactionary even
noted that, "partly owing to freespeech protection, the Internet
lacks a qualitycontrol mechanism to separate fact from hyperbole
or from outright falsehood, even in discussion that may ultimately
encourage an activity that remains illegal, for Americans of all
ages." This from a reporter employed by the newspaper that has
defended all the way to the Supreme Court (and won) its right to
publish material that the government claimed had been obtained
illegally, because of a rather unambiguous appendage to the
Constitution of the United States called the First Amendment.
These days at the Times, it seems, the amendment can be
alternately defended or vilified with the magic variable being
"Which approach will serve our business interests today?"