ГУЛаг Палестины

of female employees? One may speak of demanding competence together with beauty, but

what woman of high competence would have hesitated to find alternative employment

upon discovering the harassment and assault and career strangulation that threatened

to be her lot if she remained at 60 Minutes? And so, in turn, might this readiness

to lose the brightest women not be symptomatic of a readiness of the 60 Minutes

administration to place extraneous goals - in this case, personal sexual

gratification - above program quality? And might this same policy of demoting

program quality to less than top priority have ultimately resulted in a severe

degradation of the quality of some 60 Minutes broadcasts, as for example your story

The Ugly Face of Freedom?

(3) Does male hiring demonstrate any similar willingness to sacrifice program quality?

One cannot help contemplating that if 60 Minutes is willing to promote goals other

than program quality in its hiring of female employees, that it might be willing to

promote goals other than program quality in its hiring of male employees as well.

Might it be the case, for example, that male employees are sometimes hired not for

competence, but for adherence to a 60 Minutes ideology? Or might it be the case that

men of high professional quality left 60 Minutes, or refused to join 60 Minutes, upon

witnessing the ideological claptrap that they might be asked to read over the air in

violation of journalistic ethics and in violation of rules of evidence? This too

could help explain the low quality of The Ugly Face of Freedom.

(4) Do some 60 Minutes employees feel that malfeasance is their right? Referring to the

harassment and assaulting of female employees, reporter Mark Hertsgaard is quoted as

saying that "One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt felt this

was their right." This observation leads me to wonder whether there is not on the

part of certain 60 Minutes staff some similar attitude to the effect that

broadcasting their prejudices against Ukraine as facts is their right, and that

enjoying freedom from accountability concerning what they have broadcast about

Ukraine is also their right?

Lubomyr Prytulak

cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl,

Mike Wallace.

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 965 hits since 21Apr99

Morley Safer Letter 7 21Apr99 Does drinking wine promote longevity?

At bottom, then, I see little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and

your Ugly Face of Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your

depth, giving superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on,

discussing questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing

damage because your conclusions proved to be false.

April 21, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I find your photograph. Recently, I was searching the internet looking for a photograph

of you that I could use on the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR), and I did manage to find an

attractive one, and I did put it on UKAR, as you can see at:

http://www.ukar.org/safer.shtml

I attach to it a caption. Underneath this photograph I selected from the many

ill-considered things that you said in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face

of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its

poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must

convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian

that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were

more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a

moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this

statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and

that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it

were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or

unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm

upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining

your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.

What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,

concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a

surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The

discovery is that your name seems to be most closely connected to the conclusion that

drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you

proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The

French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may

constitute the pinnacle of your career.

For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for