Someone needs to teach the Sun a lesson in subtlety. If you're going to attack your political enemies, you need to disguise it in news that at least appears noteworthy. But, alas, the Sun is steadfastly retro — if by "retro" you mean returning to the days when newspapers didn't report the news, they created it. Today's lead story, "Cuomo, McCall in Feud over Farms," with the subhead "Frontrunner's Law Firm Represents Accused Polluters," isn't quite the Maine, but its thin veneer of newsworthiness makes it kith and kin with the pages of the city's storied, yellow-press past. According to the Sun, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo's law firm represents a number of companies that are potentially responsible for pollution cleanup under Superfund (that the same could be said of most any big law firm in the country seems to have slipped through Seth Lipsky's editorial fingers). Cuomo, who has criticized Gov. Pataki's environmental stance, is only nominally attached to the firm, and does not do any work for those clients; nor has he accepted any campaign money from them.

So where's the beef? Well, according to the Sun, this news "is raising hackles of Republicans." Assuming that this means "Republicans are eagerly grabbing onto this as a weapon against Cuomo" (though who can be sure?), Smarternysun again asks: So what? This is front-page news? There must be more to it. After all, "hackles" is such a, well, retro term, the kind reserved for serious news. But the lone source on the issue, Republican State Committee Executive Director Pat McCarthy, has only this to say: "The fact that Andrew Cuomo could be guilty of hypocrisy is no surprise — He will say anything to get elected." It sounds to the Smarternysun like Mr. McCarthy may not have been all that aware of Cuomo's affiliations before speaking to the Sun; "could be guilty" isn't all that damning, nor does Mr. McCarthy sound very "raised." Maybe a better line would have been: "The lack of any dirt on Cuomo is raising hackles of Sun staff members."

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Benjamin Smith may have won Yale's John Hersey Prize for journalism, but his front-page story, "Mayor on the Spot over Christo's Latest," would have that prize's namesake rolling in his grave. The facts are these: In 1981, the French artist Christo and his wife came up with plan to place cloth "gates" all over Central Park for a few weeks. Bloomberg is a Christo fan. Some Upper East Side hoity-toities have put two and two together and decided that the realization of Christo's plan is imminent. How would this be implemented, given that park administrators tell the Sun that they have no position on the issue, we never find out. Nor has anything been proposed, given that the 1981 proposal is just that — a dust-gathering piece of paper. And who even considers this an issue, other than a few Park Avenue types, we don't know either — Bloomberg has maintained an "ominous silence" on the issue, other than to say, in March, that he would consider "whether there's something for them to do in New York, in Central Park." Quiet. Too quiet.

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WIRE WATCH: Of today's 25 news stories, 18 came from the AP, one from the Daily Telegraph and one from Bloomberg News. Of the five Sun originals, one was a three-graph anonymous brief. This is not what those in the business world call a "value-added product."