http://www.hotwired.com/packet/flux/nc_today.html Source: Wired Magazine Contact: 24,1997 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?"