If the Sun is going to make political attack its raison d'etre, it needs to learn how to write a substantive piece that doesn't fall on its face trying to badmouth a candidate. Today's below-the-fold article — "Andrew Cuomo Steps Into, ah, His Next Messy Spat," by R.H. Sager, with the subhead, "Hog farms, He Reckons, Are Greater Threat Than Osama" — for instance, might count as mudslinging if it made any sense. From the first few paragraphs, it appears that Cuomo, a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, thinks that "large hog farms are a greater threat to American democracy than Osama bin Laden." But did he actually say that? And if so, where's the quotation? After all, it sounds pretty bad, right? It turns out that Cuomo never actually said it; rather, he was asked at a press conference (by a Sun reporter) whether he agreed with a statement made some weeks ago by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his brother-in-law. The full extent of Cuomo's comments, the entire basis for the article, is "I agree absolutely."

As to what Kennedy said, verbatim, we never find out, though there is a lengthy explanation by an unnamed aide. Apparently, Kennedy, the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, was saying that large hog farms are the type of well-connected political forces that undermine democratic institutions. Kennedy said, at some point (though The Sun doesn't tell us when) that his comments were taken out of context. An important detail, it seems, though the Sun doesn't seem to agree.

So let's get this straight: Kennedy makes a comment that is obviously very contextual and not much of a controversy-stirrer to begin with; a Sun reporter asks Cuomo at a press conference whether he agrees with the comment; Cuomo says three words in agreement; the Sun makes it front-page news. If you're wondering why this is worth writing about, so are we.

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An editorial? On Page 1? Tsk, tsk, tsk.

The editorial in question, about Lionel Jospin surprise third-place finish in the first round of the French presidential elections, is positioned to complement the article "Le Pen Poll Triumph Rocks France." But that article is a wire piece, taken from London's Daily Telegraph. The Sun gets double "tsk"s for editorializing something it doesn't even cover.

It may seem somewhat gauche to critique an editorial - after all, it's the paper's opinion — but its front-page prominence makes it fair game. More to the point, the editorial fails on the facts alone. The Sun blames Jospin's loss on his failure to support Israel strongly enough; it asks "Is it any wonder that so many voters among France's 700,000 Jews, normally sympathetic to the Socialist party, shifted out of the Socialist column and contributed to Mr. Jospin's humiliation?" They did? Wow, that's incredible news, given that "normally sympathetic" is an enormous understatement to make about French Jews' leftist tendencies. Alas, this important fact is not reported in the Telegraph piece, or any other major paper. What is the source? The Sun's editorial crystal ball, apparently. Nor does the assertion make sense — 700,000 is not a large number, given France's approximately 65 million people, and Jospin lost by more than 1.3 percent. Nor is it clear where they would shift to — not Le Pen, who once described the Holocaust as "a detail of history." Not Chirac, who is no friend of Israel, either. Indeed, why would French voters blame Jospin at all, given that Chirac is the country's diplomatic representative? At a point, as with much of the Sun, journalistic critique has to give way to exasperation, as logic makes no inroads against a paper so obviously willing to fabricate evidence to make nonsensical arguments.

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Today's lead story, "City Council, in Bow to State Department, Drops a Bill Against Palestinian Office," reports how Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage asked City Council Speaker Gifford Miller to postpone the Council's consideration to expel PLO from its New York office. The subhead relates how "Gifford Miller Crumbles After Call from Armitage, Stirring Ire Hardliners." Indeed, the all-caps lead and the articles tone suggest that Sun staff reporter Jacob Gershman counts himself among the hardliners.

But once again, today's lead story hardly constitutes news. The story looks at first like a Times scoop (today's Times does not report the call), but a close reader will find that there's not actually much news here. Not until the sixth paragraph does the story acknowledge the four-level remove between the proposal and an actual expulsion of the PLO.

First, the bill under consideration is still in committee, meaning that even if today's deliberations were to transpire, the committee would have to pass the resolution even to bring it to the council floor. Second, in all likelihood, the bill would be defeated handily in a Council-wide vote. Third, as the Times reported last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg does not support the bill because of New York's commitment to the UN as a host city, which means that he would likely have vetoed it. And fourth, even if the bill passed, it "would not directly lead to the expulsion of the PLO mission from its New York offices," as the Sun article concedes.

All those ifs certainly seem to undermine the story's claim to the top spot. But then, we're not the Sun.