The war on the Internet, say critics of the print media's tactics, is erupting because conventional media fears that the future spells big ad-revenue losses when such advertising leaves print media in favor of cyberspace.

In the Times' most recent anti-Internet diatribe, a transparent attempt to influence both the Supreme Court and public opinion, the newspaper argues, through its news columns, that children aged 2-17 are now in significant danger, and that as a result of too much free speech on the Internet, the government is losing its war on drugs.

Internet freedom fighters have also noted that the Times shows one face in its news columns and another in its editorials. With its first face, editorially, the newspaper rightfully damns the CDA as an affront to freedom-of-speech. Written across its second face, more potent as an influence on public opinion, are page-one lead headlines like: "A Seductive Drug Culture Flourishes on the Internet." (June 20).

"Teen agers need only retreat to their rooms, boot up the computer and click on a cartoon bumble bee named Buzzy to be whisked on-line, through a graphic called Bong Canyon, to a mail order house in Los Angeles that promises the scoop on "legal highs," "growing hallucinogens," "cannabis alchemy," cooking with cannabis," and "other trippy, phat, groovy things," writes Christopher Wren, a longtime Times reporter.

Wren writes that "alarms have rung in Congress and around the country about the risk that on-line pornography pose to the young," but, he explains, little has been mentioned about "a virtual do-it-yourself guide to drug use."

The reporter quotes Kellie Foster, a spokeswoman for the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, which, he says, hopes to establish its own web site in July. "We've got to get out there," Ms. Foster says, "and we're not." She claims: "We're really losing the (drug) war on the Internet." Critics of the Times' rumor-mongering point out that the war against drugs was lost long before the Internet came along.

Statistics are quoted from The Center for Media Education, a group centered in the nation's capital, to scare lawmakers and parents by saying that "nearly five million children from 2 to 17 years of age used on-line services in 1996 and that more than nine million college students use the Internet regularly."

Christopher Wren deplores the proliferation of chat rooms and on-line forums in which people freely discuss their thoughts, mostly about marijuana, L.S.D., and other drugs banned from mainstream culture.

The Clinton administration, until now an avid supporter of Internet censorship, has apparently decided the Supreme Court will be unlikely to find the Communications Decency Act meets its basic requirements for constitutionality. The president's top advisors are reportedly mapping alternative plans, minus hoped-for censorship, to regulate Internet commerce as soon as it becomes clear that the Court has quashed the CDA.

Jon Katz, celebrated author of Virtuous Reality: How America Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits, and Blockheads Like William Bennett (Random House, 1997) and of a recent article in the April issue of WIRED is quoted by the Times in defense of Internet freedoms: "The on-line world is the freest community in American life," he writes, "and its members can do things considered unacceptable elsewhere in our culture." Reporter Wren comments: "That includes challenging any assumption that drug use is wrong."

Free Internet champions insist that the Communications Decency Act shouldn't have even a chance at the Supreme Court level because free speech means free speech! One such champion, an ACLU member, quotes H.L. Mencken, famed American journalist of the 1920's and 30's: "I have believed all my life in free thought and free speech--up to and including the utmost limits of the endurable."