(FORTUNE Magazine) – A sentence in a New York Times editorial the other day got us going again on the weird inability of the Times to look a certain proposition in the eye. Proposition: the African National Congress is Communist-dominated. Sentence in the editorial: ''Though driven to violence and incorporating radicals, the Congress has a better claim to speak for many of South Africa's 24 million blacks than the white regime elected by five million whites.'' Incorporating radicals? An instant favorite in the Circumlocution Sweepstakes, that marvelously clunky phrase tells you in a trice that New York's most famous editorial board is again running from reality. The boarders' problem, so far as we can make out, is that they are committed to the ANC and yet do not wish to argue that a collectivized economy and one- party dictatorship would represent progress in South Africa. So their correspondents and editorialists continue to sound as though they have mush in their mouths; they're insistently trying to leave you thinking that Communism isn't really an issue and in the process exemplifying George Orwell's famous dictum that ''the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.'' Typical of Times reporting is the output of Joseph Lelyveld, who covered South Africa for five years (he is now the paper's bureau chief in London) and recently served up a sizable book on the country, Move Your Shadow, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The book is wonderfully informative on South African politics until you get to the ANC-Communist angle, at which point it is wonderfully evasive. Lelyveld has a habit of quoting dumb, derisible South African cops who go around calling every critic of apartheid a Communist. In one typical passage he refers with manifest dubiety to the ''ancient allegation'' that Communists dominate the ANC's military arm, then follows with a sentence suggesting that ''if this is so'' it would give the Communists a lot of prestige. You might think a correspondent who had spent five years in the country could have been less conditional. It is, in any case, fairly obvious that the leaders of the ANC's military wing -- the so-called Spear of the Nation -- are Communists, just as it is also clear that half or so of the Congress's executive committee members are also Communist party members. The ANC sent a delegation to the Soviet Party Congress in March, and just the other day three of its officials, including the two principal leaders of the Spear of the Nation, were mouthing the party line on Soviet television. We picked up these Soviet details not from the Times, incidentally, but from the British Broadcasting Corp. (The text of the BBC's extensive South African coverage is available via the old PC, in the exhaustive Nexis database.) Reading the Times, you find the subject of Communism in South Africa arising mostly in oddball contexts. For example, you could have learned in the Times in March that the general secretary of the country's Communist party was a member of the ANC's executive committee. You would have picked this up from the man's obituary: when he was alive, you would have had trouble finding the connection in the Times. But at least they didn't incorporate him.