Not for employees of the New York Sun, or at least not without the approval of the editor or managing editor. USA Today's On Deadline blog picks up on a report in the New York Observer on its fellow NYC title's style guide. If you can get past the potential absurdity of one newspaper writing about the rules another lays down for its use of language, there's quite a quote.
communist, socialist. See AP stylebook. Any favorable reference to a communist must be shown to either the editor or the managing editor of the Sun before publication.
Despite the sense of history conjured up by its archaic-looking masthead, the New York Sun was actually founded in 2002 - 12 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, and several whole decades after the kind of McCarthyism this could possibly be a fossil of. Still, the Sun's editors have clearly decided you can't be too careful while communists remain at large.
