(FORTUNE Magazine) – We must weigh in again on South Africa, especially with respect to two large questions that keep getting answered wrong in the New York Times and Washington Post. Question No. 1 is whether sanctions against South Africa -- enacted by Congress last fall over a presidential veto -- have turned out to be a good idea. No. 2 is whether anybody should care about the African National Congress being Communist dominated. It is hard to point to any positive effects of sanctions. The thought behind them was that America's nudging of the Botha regime had theretofore been much too gentle, and that now it was time to convey a tough message: The regime must proceed much more rapidly with the dismantling of apartheid. Plainly, sanctions have had no such effect on the regime. As a Times reporter wrote in January, ''Mr. Botha feels disappointed and betrayed over the reaction abroad . . . to the program of cautious change he instituted in the early Eighties.'' Since the sanctions began, the reforms have clearly stopped. And, as another Times reporter noted recently, ''American influence with the South African government appears practically nonexistent.'' When a policy has effects opposite from those intended, you might normally view it as a bad idea. But you cannot find anything resembling an editorial in either the Times or Post suggesting any regrets about sanctions. The only sign of anybody doing any rethinking was a quite remarkable article by opedster William Raspberry, a mostly liberal Post columnist who happens to be black -- and who originally supported sanctions. A few weeks ago, Raspberry wrote: ''The only people who can be cheered by . . . the devastation of the economy and the tightening of the screws of repression are those who believe that bloody revolution is the only solution and that sanctions, by making conditions completely intolerable for blacks, will bring on the revolution. Is that what we really want?'' It seems quite plainly to be what a lot of liberals want. Communist domination of the ANC is a subject Keeping Up has complained about for many months. The complaint used to be that the media were too polite to even bring up the subject, but we are making progress. Now the Times and % Post mention it quite frequently, and they were doing so again late in January, when ANC president Oliver Tambo was in the U.S. and being interviewed a lot. But now we have a new complaint: Both papers keep airing the view that Communism is somehow irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the ANC is Communist dominated. Times columnist Anthony Lewis expressed this view in a recent dispatch from southern Africa arguing that we mustn't see things ''along East- West lines,'' as conservatives are always doing. Lewis added that Africans are just uninterested in ''right-wing . . . talk about Communist influence in the ANC.'' This is also Tambo's own line, sympathetically rendered in the Post recently. (''The issue of Communism is not an issue at all in South Africa,'' he assured the reporter.) You are supposed to believe, in short, that it really doesn't matter if a black South Africa models itself on utterly repressive Marxist regimes like those in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, all of which are economic basket cases and not exactly committed to the liberal principles espoused by the world's two greatest newspapers.