John O'Sullivan of the Chicago Sun-Times gives a very interesting tutorial on how to glean information from our newspapers just like the people of the Soviet Union used to do with theirs:
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.
I've been seeing a lot of non-reportage of the Swift Boat charges, followed by editorials denouncing "anti-Kerry lies". That's not how it went with the Fahrenheit 9-11 story.
The Washington Post now has five editorials on the Swift Boat issue, a topic they only touched in their news pages to dismiss. For that one editorial that is not a denunciation of the Swift Boaters, they should be grateful. It's the only thing that saves them from being a Yakov Smirnoff joke.