Other than local news and the comics, there isn't much in my town's newspaper worth reading. By the time it is printed and delivered, it's all old news. I read my morning paper with the news on to find out what has changed since the paper's deadline. Given the high costs of printing and delivering newspapers, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see most hardcopy newspapers cease printing within 10 years or so.

The Internet has changed everything. With very little effort, anyone can read from news sources around the world. The mainstream press (hardcopy papers and the network news) are no longer the gatekeepers of public information. We can bypass them any time we want. We've seen this firsthand this month with the Swiftboat Vets story. Papers like the NYT or Washington Post don't want to carry the story, but polls show over half of all voters have seen the ads and are familiar with the allegations. It has almost come to this:

Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, once reproved me for quoting the old joke about the two main official Soviet newspapers: ''There's no truth in Pravda [Truth] and no news in Izvestia [News].'' He pointed out that you could learn a great deal of truthful news from both papers if you read them with proper care.

They often denounced ''anti-Soviet lies.'' These lies had never been reported by them. Nor were they lies. And their exposure was the first that readers had been told of them. By reading the denunciation carefully, however, intelligent readers could decipher what the original story must have been.

That is exactly how intelligent readers now have to read most of the establishment media -- at least when they are reporting on the ''anti-Kerry lies'' of the swift boat veterans. Two weeks ago I pointed out that the main media outlets were ignoring the story that 254 swift boat veterans were accusing Sen. John Kerry of being, in effect, a liar and a blowhard. I doubted that this suppression could be sustained for long since free-lance journalists on the Internet were examining it -- and uncovering what seemed like damaging evidence that at least some of the charges had substance.

It was sustained for exactly one week. Then the Kerry campaign quietly withdrew the senator's claim -- a claim he had made repeatedly in speeches and articles for 20 years -- that he had been on an illegal secret mission inside Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. Kerry's admission was not reported the next day in either the New York Times or the Washington Post. True, the Post did carry an editorial supporting Kerry against the Swift Boat for Truth veterans. But it ignored the only new piece of news since that would have undermined the editorial's argument.

A handful of other newspapers joined the Post in writing editorials or columns supporting Kerry. Still the New York Times maintained a dignified silence. Then Kerry delivered a major speech last Thursday denouncing the Bush campaign for secretly (and illegally) orchestrating the veterans' charges. At which point the Times reported the speech and its own analysis that not only supported the Kerry charge that Bush was orchestrating the swift boat veterans but that also sought to disprove their accusations. Here then were the denunciations of the "anti-Kerry lies" that would finally enable Times readers to get the news. At long last they could be told what 57 percent of Americans (according to a poll) had already learned from the Internet, talk radio, a handful of conservative papers and magazines, and other samizdat outlets.

In order to get an accurate picture, however, the reader had to interpret the Times. For instance, toward the end of its analysis the Times conceded the existence of the Cambodia story, stating that this was the one accusation that Kerry had "not laid to rest." In fact, it was the one accusation that the senator had laid to rest by admitting that his claims were false. All the other accusations remained in the limbo of charges still disputed by both sides.

In seeking to demonstrate links between the swift boat veterans and Bush, the Times produced no evidence of orchestration, nor did Kerry, but pointed out that some of the Texan Republicans helping the veterans knew other Texas Republicans who knew political consultants who knew people in the Bush campaign who knew Karl Rove. It illustrated these sinister connections with a chart and linking diagrams.

If the Bush campaign could be convicted of secretly ''coordinating'' with the swift boaters on evidence like that, the Kerry campaign might end up being held responsible for the vastly larger $60 million ad campaigns organized by independent organizations against Bush -- and for the publication and distribution of the New York Times itself! After all, the timing of its Bush conspiracy theory -- just the day after the Kerry campaign unveiled that very conspiracy -- was distinctly fishy.