urrecting Jewish life, we receive help from such prominent Ukrainian intellectuals and parliamentarians as B. Oliynyk, P. Osadchuk, O. Yemets, D. Pavlychko, V. Yavorivskyi, I. Drach, P. Movchan, M. Shulha, I. Dziuba, V. Durdynets, and many others. We do not want to return to former times, and yet that is the direction in which your broadcast is pushing us. You have done as the Bolsheviks used to do - you presented information that is one-sided, suppressed information that does not fit your stereotype, biased the selection of materials, strengthened and reinforced negativism. It would be as if the Los Angeles riots were shown to us here as representative American events. If you want to convince yourselves that everything I have been saying is true, please come to us and film anything you want. Please regard this as an official invitation of our Jewish Council. Certainly there exist many disappointments in our work. A lot remains to be done in revitalizing Jewish culture. We cannot immediately realize all our goals. But this is never merely because we are Jews; it is never attributable to either state-sponsored or spontaneous anti-Semitism. You must be aware in what a difficult economic situation Ukraine finds itself - and yet despite this, the government gives high priority to the support of cultural diversity, included in which is the support of Jewish culture. For example, the observance of the Days of Jewish Culture in Ukraine was funded entirely by the Ukrainian government - close to two billion karbovantsi, and this in our difficult economic times! It is these many things, then, that are of importance to us, and not the activities of individual ultra-nationalists who don't receive support from most Ukrainians; where in fact most Ukrainians condemn their activities. Oh, democracy! Is there any country, even the United States, which has succeeded in ridding itself of anti-Semitism? And are the American anti-Semites representative of official government attitudes toward Jews? Or are isolated events in Los Angeles reflective of United States government attitudes toward Blacks? Esteemed gentlemen! You didn't do a good thing insulting the Ukrainian people. Imagine if someone collected similarly true but unrepresentative facts to paint a negative picture of the Jewish people. Remember the Biblical injunction: Don't do anything to another that you would not want done to yourself. Please revisit us with an open mind, and not with any fixed bias. The United States is presently awaiting the visit of our President, and we don't want his visit to be marred by any anti-Ukrainian actions from anybody, especially not from Jews; nor would we want American assistance to our country to depend on isolated individuals who are opposed to granting such assistance. We await you in Ukraine. Respectfully, I.M. Levitas Head of the Jewish Council of Ukraine Head of the Nationalities Associations of Ukraine HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan Jordan > 726 hits since 23May98 Jordan Letter 5 Jul 18/96 Genetic anti-Semitism July 18, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: I have some questions for Morley Safer, and I route them to him through you, as I have discovered over the years that he is not very communicative when addressed directly - perhaps if the request to respond to these questions came from you, he might be more forthcoming. Specifically, I wonder if you would be so good as to ask Mr. Safer the questions organized under the following eight points, all of them in connection with his October 23, 1994 statement that "The Church and Government of Ukraine have tried to ease people's fears, suggesting that ... Ukrainians, despite the allegations, are not genetically anti-Semitic.": (1) Through what source did Mr. Safer become aware of the allegation that Ukrainians were genetically anti-Semitic? And what were the qualifications of this source in the field of human genetics, particularly in the field of the genetic inheritance of cognitive predispositions? (2) Before broadcasting this allegation, did Mr. Safer verify its plausibility with any responsible geneticist? (3) What does Mr. Safer mean by "the church of Ukraine"? This reference is as puzzling as would be a reference to "the church of the United States." (4) Could Mr. Safer divulge the name of the church representative who issued this denial of a genetic predisposition to anti-Semitism on the part of Ukrainians, and indicate as well the time and the place of the denial? (5) Could Mr. Safer similarly identify the Government of Ukraine representative who issued this same denial of a genetic predisposition to anti-Semitism on the part of Ukrainians - who was it, when, where? (6) Is Mr. Safer aware of a genetic predisposition to anti-Semitism on the part of any other group - or is this in his estimation a uniquely Ukrainian phenomenon? (7) Has Mr. Safer considered the possibility that his own antipathy toward Ukrainians is genetically based? If not, then how would he account for it? And if not, would Mr. Safer be willing to issue a public statement to the effect that his anti-Ukrainianism is not genetic in origin? (8) Could Mr. Safer comment on the possibility that the refusal of CBS personnel to discuss "The Ugly Face of Freedom" might similarly be genetically-based? If CBS personnel reject the notion that their corporate decisions are genetically influenced, then could Mr. Safer persuade them to issue a joint statement to this effect, and in particular denying that they are genetically anti-Ukrainian? These few and simple questions, it seems to me, serve the useful purpose of establishing what category Mr. Safer's statement falls into: that of a responsible journalist who picks his words carefully and later stands by them, or that of a bigot who gets up in front of the camera and begins to ramble off the top of his head - and later selects muteness as the optimal defense for his irresponsibility. Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan Jordan > HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan Jordan > 1473 hits since 23May98 Jordan Letter 6 Jul 19/96 Allowing a fabulist on 60 Minutes July 19, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: When I began reading Simon Wiesenthal in late 1994, I was naive enough to imagine that my discovery that he had a credibility problem was an original one. Since that time, however, I have learned that Mr. Wiesenthal's lack of credibility is widely known and openly acknowledged. For example, on April 28, 1996, I received a letter from a Jewish faculty member at an American University, from which I quote the following: I do not doubt for a moment ... that Simon Wiesenthal is a fabulist - which is the fancy literary word for an unmitigated liar. My father (an Auschwitz inmate) told me many terrible stories about Wiesenthal's role after the war in the Austrian DP camps. Wiesenthal is of the same ilk as Elie Wiesel: a secular saint, he can make the most absurd claims without fear of exposure. Now the question that I would like to add to the ones that I have already addressed to you is the following: How did it come to pass that in 1994 a reputable investigative journalism show featured as its star witness someone who is widely known to be - shall we say - a "fabulist"? And from this question springs a second one: How does it come to pass today that a reputable investigative journalism show, having learned that it has been victimized by a "fabulist," refuses to take any corrective action? Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace, Simon Wiesenthal HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan 673 hits since 23May98 Jordan Letter 7 Aug 19/96 Loud laughter greeted this ingenuous objection Aug 19, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: As we have already seen, it was I. M. Levitas (Head of the Jewish Council of Ukraine and Head of the Nationalities Associations of Ukraine) who first suggested that the tactics employed by 60 Minutes in "The Ugly Face of Freedom" were totalitarian: "You have done as the Bolsheviks used to do - you presented information that is one-sided, suppressed information that does not fit your stereotype, biased the selection of materials, strengthened and reinforced negativism. It would be as if the Los Angeles riots were shown to us here as representative American events." Of course the suggestion that 60 Minutes is capable of assuming a totalitarian orientation toward broadcast journalism must initially strike anyone as hyperbolic - and yet reflection reinforces the parallel again and again. For example, here is a passage from Arthur Koestler. Koestler was giving a talk in Spain in 1938, and calculatedly included three statements which he knew to normal people appeared laudable, whereas to Communists, they amounted to declarations of war: The first was: "No movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility." The second was: "Appeasing the enemy is as foolish as persecuting the friend who pursues your own aim by a different road." The third was a quotation from Thomas Mann: "A harmful truth is better than a useful lie." (In "The God That Failed," edited by Richard Crossman, Bantam, 1949, p. 64) In reading Koestler's passage, each of his statements struck me as being applicable to 60 Minutes, and struck me as well as being statements that 60 Minutes too might view as something akin to "declarations of war": (1) That having committed a host of errors in its broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom," and afterward refusing to issue a correction or retraction for a single one of them, 60 Minutes is thereby implicitly assuming a stance of infallibility. (2) That whereas 60 Minutes has never made the least response to any of my submissions, it cannot be said to be persecuting me; still, in failing to respond, it is treating me contemptuously, as if I were an enemy, when in fact I am a friend, interested in the same goal as 60 Minutes itself - which is to restore its high prestige. I only differ as to the road by which I think this goal can be reached. 60 Minutes believes that covering up error is better; I think that acknowledging error is better. And Koestler's "appeasing the enemy" finds application as well - it is Morley Safer and Simon Wiesenthal who have injured 60 Minutes and who are presently being appeased. (3) 60 Minutes "useful lie" is that "The Ugly Face of Freedom" was error-free. The "harmful truth" is that "The Ugly Face of Freedom" may well hold the record for being the most concentrated segment of disinformation ever to be broadcast by the mainstream media. And in reality, it is the "harmful truth" which is better - had the "harmful truth" been acknowledged immediately, the wound inflicted by "The Ugly Face of Freedom" would have healed long ago; if the "harmful truth" were acknowledged today, the healing process would begin today; however, following the path of the "useful lie" just leaves the wound festering. And then, in the same volume as the Koestler statement, I came across Ignazio Silone's recounting of an incident which still further reinforced the parallel between 60 Minutes and totalitarianism. Silone was at the time of the incident a member of the Italian Communist delegation to the Communist International. During a meeting in Moscow, the English delegate was describing a problem that the British Communist Party was encountering with the British trade unions. His statement was interrupted by the Russian delegate, Piatnisky, who offered the obvious solution - that the British Communists should simply tell the trade unions one thing, but then do exactly the opposite. Silone continues: The English Communist interrupted, "But that would be a lie." Loud laughter greeted this ingenuous objection, frank, cordial, interminable laughter, the like of which the gloomy offices of the Communist International had perhaps never heard before. The joke quickly spread all over Moscow, for the Englishman's entertaining and incredible reply was telephoned at once to Stalin and to the most important offices of State, provoking new waves of mirth everywhere. (In "The God That Failed," edited by Richard Crossman, Bantam, 1949, p. 92) And this, it now strikes me, may be close to 60 Minutes' reaction to the charges that it lied - the reaction being, specifically, that the truth value of the broadcast is irrelevant, that any discussion of truth misses the point, and that anyone protesting a lack of truth is comically naive. Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE BLEICH < Bleich Bleich > 1763 hits since 23May98 Bleich Letter 8 23May98 Please substantiate or retract If your 60 Minutes testimony concerning violent attacks on Jews by Ukrainians and motivated by anti-Semitism is true, then it behooves you to substantiate it and in so doing to remove the doubt which surrounds it. If your 60 Minutes testimony is false, then it behooves you to retract it. Either option will constitute a step toward restoring your standing in the eyes of the Ukrainian community, and in ameliorating Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Silence is an option only if you are prepared to encourage the conclusion that you spoke impulsively and irresponsibly, and that you subsequently lacked the courage and integrity to admit your error. May 23, 1998 Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich 29 Shchekavytska Street Kiev 254071 Ukraine Dear Rabbi Bleich: In your appearance on the 60 Minutes broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom" of 23 October 1994, you offered some startling testimony concerning the existence of anti-Semitism in contemporary Ukraine. In your own words: There have been a number of physical attacks. In a small town, two elderly Jews were attacked at knifepoint and stabbed because they are Jews and because of the myth that all Jews must have money hidden in their homes. The same thing was in west Ukraine, the Carpathian region. These are very, very frightening facts, because it's - again that stereotype that we mentioned before, when that leads someone to really - to - to stab an older couple and leave them helpless, and - you know? - they left them for dead. That means that we have serious problems. In the mind of the typical 60 Minutes viewer, your statement would constitute a substantial proportion of the Ugly Face of Freedom's evidence for the existence of anti-Semitism in today's Ukraine, and the only evidence at all for the eruption of this anti-Semitism into violence. However, I cannot help noticing that your statement is devoid of detail. You do not disclose the names of the victims, nor the places and dates of the attacks. Nor do you indicate the source of your information - did you hear about these attacks on the radio, see them on television, read about them in the newspapers, receive personal communication, or what? This lack of detail is particularly troubling in view of four considerations: (1) that your non-specific testimony occurred in the middle of a broadcast which was dominated by misrepresentation and disinformation; (2) that it came from the mouth of an individual recognized in the Ukrainian community for holding anti-Ukrainian views, and for spreading anti-Ukrainian hatred, as I think I have demonstrated in my seven previous letters to you of 6Jan95, 26Sep97, 27Sep97, 28Sep97, 29Sep97, 29Sep97, and 30Sep97, in which letters are discussed such issues as that of your reciting every Saturday in the capital city of Ukraine the Khmelnytsky curse; (3) that Jewish interests have sometimes employed exaggerated, or wholly-imagined, or even self-inflicted anti-Semitic acts to achieve such aims as heightened group cohesion or increased emigration to Israel; and (4) that Jewish groups in Ukraine who monitor anti-Semitic incidents report being unaware of the two attacks that you describe. Specifically with respect to point (4) above, an open letter to Morley Safer and the 60 Minutes staff from I. M. Levitas, Head of the Jewish Council of Ukraine as well as of the Nationalities Associations of Ukraine, as published in the Lviv newspaper Za Vilnu Ukrainu (For a Free Ukraine) on December 2, 1994, included the following observations, which I translate from the original Ukrainian. In the portion of the letter that I quote below, Mr. Levitas argues that the attacks you describe may have been simple robberies devoid of anti-Semitism. More importantly, Mr. Levitas provides us with reason to wonder whether the attacks occurred at all: You reported that two Jews were robbed and beaten. This might have happened, but most likely not because they were Jews. I imagine that in Lviv, Ukrainians are also robbed (and significantly more often!), and yet nobody draws from this the sort of conclusions concerning ethnic hostility that you draw from the robbing of these two Jews. Our Jewish Council constantly receives news concerning Jews in Ukraine, but during the past five years, we have received not a single report of anyone being beaten because he was a Jew. However, it must be admitted that such a thing may have occurred without it coming to our attention - there are plenty of miscreants in every country. The above speculations lead us once again to the questions of whether your orientation toward the Ukrainian state is supportive or destructive, responsible or irresponsible, restrained by reason or fired by emotion. A step toward answering such questions would be taken by your responding to the points below: (1) Would you be able to provide the names of the two sets of Jewish victims that you alluded to (that is, the victims of the knife attack, and the similar victims in the "Carpathian region"), and the places and dates of the attacks? If by "a number of attacks" you mean more than two, I would appreciate receiving such documentation for the other attacks as well. If in addition you are in possession of corroborative evidence such as videotapes, newspaper clippings, or letters, I would appreciate receiving copies of these as well. (2) If the attacks did occur, then there follows the question of what motivated them. Mr. Levitas suggests that if the knife attack occurred, then it was more likely driven by economic motives than anti-Semitic ones. You, on the other hand offer that the attack occurred "because they are Jews," and "because of the myth that all Jews must have money hidden in their homes," and because "it's - again that stereotype." But for you to know that the motivation was predominantly anti-Semitic, the perpetrators of the attacks must have been caught and must have confessed and disclosed their motivation, unless there exists some alternative evidence pointing to the same conclusion. In any case, whatever the nature of the material that you relied upon to conclude that the two attacks had been motivated by anti-Semitism, I wonder if you would be able to provide me with a copy of it. (3) I myself was unaware of any Ukrainian "myth that all Jews must have money hidden in their homes." This strikes me not so much as a myth believed by Ukrainians about Jews, as a myth believed by yourself about Ukrainians. I wonder if you could inform me of what evidence you have that Ukrainians are so primitive in their thinking as to entertain the fantastic myth that "all Jews must have money hidden in their homes." If your 60 Minutes testimony concerning violent attacks on Jews by Ukrainians and motivated by anti-Semitism is true, then it behooves you to substantiate it and in so doing to remove the doubt which surrounds it. If your 60 Minutes testimony is false, then it behooves you to retract it. Either option will constitute a step toward restoring your standing in the eyes of the Ukrainian community, and in ameliorating Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Silence is an option only if you are prepared to encourage the conclusion that you spoke impulsively and irresponsibly, and that you subsequently lacked the courage and integrity to admit your error. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER Safer > 815 hits since 24May98 Morely Safer Letter 1 28Dec94 Please explain silence December 28, 1994 Morley Safer 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Dear Mr. Safer: I have been wondering which of the following three reasons best explains why 60 Minutes has not yet broadcast a correction, a retraction, and an apology for "The Ugly Face of Freedom": (1) The amount of disinformation in the broadcast was so large that a considerable amount of research and introspection are necessary before a full and just response can be formulated - but one will soon be forthcoming. (2) 60 Minutes' researchers and consultants have concluded that none of the objections to the broadcast are valid, and a full rebuttal of these objections will shortly be made available. (3) Whether the Ukrainian objections are right or wrong is irrelevant - what is relevant is that CBS views Ukrainians as too weak to force CBS to suffer any loss of face. As time passes with no response from 60 Minutes, Ukrainians are increasingly pulled toward the third of these as the correct explanation. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER < Safer Safer > 669 hits since 24May98 Morely Safer Letter 2 19Mar96 Contempt for the viewer March 19, 1996 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Dear Mr. Safer: I have been resisting occasional impulses to expand and amplify "The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes," which as you know is my December 1994 critique of 60 Minutes broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom" - as it presently stands, this critique covers the main points adequately, and I do not have time to polish it. Occasionally, however, some defect or other of the 60 Minutes broadcast presents itself from a new angle, and I find myself wondering if adding a description of this freshly-viewed defect to my critique would not strengthen it. For example, just now I thought of adding: Mr. Safer tells us of the Lviv reunion of Galicia Division veterans that "Nowhere, not even in Germany, are the SS so openly celebrated," and yet does not pause to explain how it can be that in this most open of all celebrations of the SS, not a single portrait of Hitler can be seen, not a single hand is raised in a Heil Hitler salute, no Nazi marching songs are being sung or played, no Nazi speeches are recorded, not a single swastika is anywhere on display - not even a single "SS" can be discovered anywhere among the many medals and insignia worn by the veterans. So devoid is this reunion of any of the signs that one might expect in any open celebration of the SS that one wonders what led Mr. Safer to the conclusion that that is what it was. Perhaps it is the case that Mr. Safer was so carried away by his enthusiasm for the feelings that he was sharing with 60 Minutes viewers that he quite overlooked the absence of corroborative evidence. But if so, then is it not the case that he was taking another step toward turning a broadcast that purported to be one of investigative journalism into an Oprah Winfrey-style I-bare-my-secret-emotions-to-all-fest, with the secret emotions bared being those of the correspondent himself? What do you think? - Would this paragraph be worth adding or not? Perhaps it is too strong, and would only weaken the critique? On the other hand, how else to get CBS to retract and to winnow its staff of offending personnel than by stating the defects of "The Ugly Face of Freedom" boldly? Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Michael Jordan, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. Morley Safer Letter 3 24May98 Your name inevitably comes up If you cannot find instances of unfairness or inaccuracy in the many accusations that have been leveled against The Ugly Face of Freedom, then I wonder whether your refusing to retract and apologize satisfies standards of journalistic ethics. May 24, 1998 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Dear Mr. Safer: I am enclosing a copy of my letter to Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich dated 23May98 asking him to corroborate or to retract certain of his statements broadcast on the 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom of 23Oct94. The subject of that letter leads to further questions that I would like to put to you. As your broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom was devoid of evidence supporting the extreme conclusions that you were offering, and as the documentation of the two attacks on Jews that Rabbi Bleich describes would have begun to provide some such missing evidence, why did you not get in touch with the two sets of victims, as well as with law enforcement officials, and interview them for the 60 Minutes broadcast? In the case of the knife attack on two elderly Jews, Rabbi Bleich describes the victims as having been left "for dead." Thus, the severity of this attack possibly resulted in the taking of police and medical photographs, and possibly resulted in newspaper coverage, and these photographs and newspaper stories, together with any on-camera testimony of the victims and police officials would have begun to add substantiation to your broadcast. In fact, if the perpetrators of any of the attacks had been apprehended, you might have been able to interview them as well. Any of these steps would have done much to enhance the quality of your work - and yet you seem to have failed to take any of these elementary and obvious steps. I wonder if you could explain why. The suspicion that you would be attempting to refute in your answer is that you did indeed take the obvious steps of attempting to interview the victims and attempting to confirm the stories with law enforcement officials, discovered that the stories did not pan out, but finding yourself thin on material, broadcast Rabbi Bleich's allusions to them anyway. You will see that in my letter to Rabbi Bleich, I request particulars concerning the two or more attacks that he refers to. I now put the same request to you: if you are able to provide confirmatory details, please do so - at a minimum, the names of the victims, and the locations and dates of the attacks; copies of newspaper clippings or other documentation if you have it. If you are unable to document Rabbi Bleich's stories, then it would seem appropriate that you retract them. A comment on a related point. You must be aware that a number of the defects of the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom are discussed on the Ukrainian Archive web site, particularly in the section at www.ukar.org/60min.shtml, and to a lesser extent in other places on the larger site at www.ukar.org. Your name inevitably comes up in these discussions. Using the site's internal search engine to search for your name reveals that it appears hundreds of times spread over dozens of documents. I mention this to invite you to examine these many references with the aim of determining their accuracy and fairness. If you have any comments to make concerning these references, then I can promise you that these comments will be reproduced on the Ukrainian Archive complete and unedited, and that any instances of unfairness or inaccuracy that you bring to my attention will be immediately corrected. If you cannot find instances of unfairness or inaccuracy in the many accusations that have been leveled against The Ugly Face of Freedom, then I wonder whether your refusing to retract and apologize satisfies standards of journalistic ethics. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER < Safer Safer > 626 hits since 5Dec98 Morely Safer Letter 4 5Dec98 Press responsibility and accountability The fairness doctrine, which included the equal-time provision, was scrapped under Reagan. Television news programs are under no obligation to present all sides of an issue. December 5, 1998 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Dear Mr. Safer: The passage below from Michael Crichton's novel Airframe draws a picture of American television news as irresponsible and lacking accountability: Edward Fuller was the head of Norton Legal. He was a thin, ungainly man of forty. He sat uneasily in the chair in Marder's office. "Edward," Marder said, "we have a problem. Newsline is going to run a story on the N-22 this weekend on prime-time television, and it is going to be highly unfavorable." "How unfavorable?" "They're calling the N-22 a deathtrap." "Oh dear," Fuller said. "That's very unfortunate." "Yes, it is," Marder said. "I brought you in because I want to know what I can do about it." "Do about it?" Fuller said, frowning. "Yes," Marder said. "What can we do? Can we prevent them from running the story?" "No." "Can we get a court injunction barring them?" "No. That's prior restraint. And from a publicity standpoint, it's ill advised." "You mean it would look bad." "An attempt to muzzle the press? Violate the First Amendment? That would suggest you have something to hide." "In other words," Marder said, "they can run the story, and we are powerless to stop them." "Yes." "Okay. But I think Newsline's information is inaccurate and biased. Can we demand they give equal time to our evidence?" "No," Fuller said. "The fairness doctrine, which included the equal-time provision, was scrapped under Reagan. Television news programs are under no obligation to present all sides of an issue." "So they can say anything they want? No matter how unbalanced?" "That's right." "That doesn't seem proper." "It's the law," Fuller said, with a shrug. "Okay," Marder said. "Now this program is going to air at a very sensitive moment for our company. Adverse publicity may very well cost us the China sale." "Yes, it might." "Suppose that we lost business as a result of their show. If we can demonstrate that Newsline presented an erroneous view - and we told them it was erroneous - can we sue them for damages?" "As a practical matter, no. We would probably have to show they proceeded with 'reckless disregard' for the facts known to them. Historically, that has been extremely difficult to prove." "So Newsline is not liable for damages?" "No." "They can say whatever they want, and if they put us out of business, it's our tough luck?" "That's correct." "Is there any restraint at all on what they say?" "Well." Fuller shifted in his chair. "If they falsely portrayed the company, they might be liable. But in this instance, we have a lawsuit brought by an attorney for a passenger on 545. So Newsline is able to say they're just reporting the facts: that an attorney made the following accusations about us." "I understand," Marder said. "But a claim filed in a court has limited publicity. Newsline is going to present these crazy claims to forty million viewers. And at the same time, they'll automatically validate the claims, simply by repeating them on television. The damage to us comes from their exposure, not from the original claims." "I take your point," Fuller said. "But the law doesn't see it that way. Newsline has the right to report a lawsuit." "Newsline has no responsibility to independently assess the legal claims being made, no matter how outrageous? If the lawyers said, for example, that we employed child molesters, Newsline could still report that, with no liability to themselves?" "Correct." "Let's say we go to trial and win. It's clear that Newsline presented an erroneous view of our product, based on the attorney's allegations, which have been thrown out of court. Is Newsline obligated to retract the statements they made to forty million viewers?" "No. They have no such obligation." "Why not?" "Newsline can decide what's newsworthy. If they think the outcome of the trial is not newsworthy, they don't have to report it. It's their call." "And meanwhile, the company is bankrupt," Marder said. "Thirty thousand employees lose their jobs, houses, health benefits, and start new careers at Burger King. And another fifty thousand lose their jobs, when our suppliers go belly up in Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Connecticut. All those fine people who've devoted their lives working to design, build, and support the best airframe in the business get a firm handshake and a swift kick in the butt. Is that how it works?" Fuller shrugged. "That's how the system works. Yes." "I'd say the system sucks." "The system is the system," Fuller said. Marder glanced at Casey, then turned back to Fuller. "Now Ed," he said. "This situation sounds very lopsided. We make a superb product, and all the objective measures of its performance demonstrate that it's safe and reliable. We've spent years developing and testing it. We've got an irrefutable track record. But you're saying a television crew can come in, hang around a day or two, and trash our product on national TV. And when they do, they have no responsibility for their acts, and we have no way to recover damages." Fuller nodded. "Pretty lopsided," Marder said. Fuller cleared his throat. "Well, it wasn't always that way. But for the last thirty years, since Sullivan in 1964, the First Amendment has been invoked in defamation cases. Now the press has a lot more breathing room." "Including room for abuse," Marder said. Fuller shrugged. "Press abuse is an old complaint," he said. "Just a few years after the First Amendment was passed, Thomas Jefferson complained about how inaccurate the press was, how unfair -" "But Ed," Marder said. "We're not talking about two hundred years ago. And we're not talking about a few nasty editorials in colonial newspapers. We're talking about a television show with compelling images that goes instantaneously to forty, fifty million people - a sizable percentage of the whole country - and murders our reputation. Murders it. Unjustifiably. That's the situation we're talking about here. So," Marder said, "what do you advise us to do, Ed?" "Well," Fuller cleared his throat again. "I always advise my clients to tell the truth." Of course Michael Crichton's depiction above is fictional, and so may be exaggerated. However, anyone who is acquainted with 60 Minutes' broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom of 23 Oct 1994 - hosted by yourself - cannot help wondering whether Crichton's depiction might in fact be accurate, at least in occasional instances. I wonder if you would not at long last care to break your silence and say a word either of retraction and apology, or if not that, then at least some word in defense of your broadcast and of your profession? Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER < Safer Safer > 820 hits since 9Apr99 Morley Safer Letter 5 9Apr99 Who blew the hands off Maksym Tsarenko? The sort of powerful story that neither you nor Rabbi Bleich were able to find is one of a Russian summer-camp councillor who had his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using the Russian language within Ukraine; or one of a Jewish summer-camp councillor having his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using Hebrew or Yiddish within Ukraine. Such things do not happen within Ukraine to either Russians or to Jews - they happen only to Ukrainians. April 9, 1999 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Morley Safer: Who Blew The Hands Off Maksym Tsarenko? The photograph above shows Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma bestowing the Order of Yaroslaw the Wise on Maksym Tsarenko. My free translation of the text which explains the photograph is as follows: Among the first recipients of the Order, awarded on the fourth anniversary of the national independence of Ukraine, were leading Ukrainian workers in the fields of culture, art, and law: O. Basystiuk, A. Mokrenko, and F. Burchak. On this same day, the president of Ukraine also bestowed this mark of distinction, "for valor" upon twenty-year-old student at the Vynnytsia Pedagogical Institute, Maksym Tsarenko. During the summer holidays, Maksym was working as a councillor at a summer camp for young girls near Yevpatoria, Crimea. Haters of Ukraine, who rush to propose the view that Crimea is not a peninsula attached to Ukraine, but rather is an island unconnected to Ukraine, reacted with hostility to this summer camp, especially provoked by the Ukrainian language spoken by the Ukrainian children, which dared to resound even within Ukrainian Crimea. The hatred mounted to such an irrepressible degree that it provoked the bandits to the most egregious crime: they constructed an explosive and threw it into the window of the children's dormitory. Ten or so children could have been killed by the explosion. But the young Ukrainian councillor showed no confusion as to his duty. He picked up the bomb, shielding it with his own body, and jumped out of the building. Unfortunately, the bomb went off, seriously wounding Maksym. The best local surgeons fought for several days to save the boy's life. Thanks to them, the youth's life was spared. Unfortunately, it was not possible to save his hands. No one can accuse the recipient of not having earned his award. Ukrainian awards, in contrast to Soviet, are fully deserved. (Ukrainian-language newspaper, Novyi Shliakh (New Pathway) of 7Oct95, based on the earlier report in Ukrains'ke Slovo, (Ukrainian Word), Kyiv, No. 37, 14Sep95) The above story of Maksym Tsarenko compels me to ask - not for the first time - who is in danger in Ukraine? The Western media urge us to accept that it is Jews and Russians who are in danger, threatened by Ukrainian nationalists. That, for example, is the conclusion of your infamous 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom of 23Oct94. However, you came back from your brief visit to Ukraine with no data to substantiate such a claim. Almost a year ago, the Ukrainian Archive has requested both of you and of Rabbi Bleich the evidence backing your report of violence against Jews, and neither of you has as yet condescended to reply, strengthening the suspicion that your story was fabricated. The sort of powerful story that neither you nor Rabbi Bleich were able to find is one of a Russian summer-camp councillor who had his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using the Russian language within Ukraine; or one of a Jewish summer-camp councillor having his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using Hebrew or Yiddish within Ukraine. Such things do not happen within Ukraine to either Russians or to Jews - they happen only to Ukrainians. It is the story of Ukrainians being persecuted within Ukraine that you could have richly documented and broadcast to the world. The story of Maksym Tsarenko can be found multiplied many times over - the torture-murders of Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Katelnytsky and his mother in their Kyiv apartment providing a recent example. The contrasting story of Jewish or Russian victimization within Ukraine is bogus - and yet that is the story that you unscrupulously chose to broadcast. Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Rabbi Bleich, Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER < Safer Safer > 1973 hits since 20Apr99 Morley Safer Letter 6 20Apr99 What kind of people run 60 Minutes? Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom. - Carol Lloyd The excerpt quoted in my letter to Morley Safer below is taken from a Carol Lloyd's A Feel For a Good Story of 17Mar98, published on the web site Mothers Who Think, whose home page can be accessed by clicking on the link immediately above, or on the logo immediately below: 60 Minutes Executive Producer, Don Hewitt. But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship. One woman described to Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there and forced his tongue down her throat. - Carol Lloyd April 20, 1999 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Morley Safer: I call to your attention the following excerpt from Carol Lloyd's A Feel For a Good Story, published on the web site Mothers Who Think on 17Mar98. I will be asking you further below whether the information provided by Carol Lloyd might help explain your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom: The irony is that Hewitt - the creator of the TV show famous for unveiling corruption and hypocrisy among the powerful - has been accused of worse deeds than any of the sexual charges leveled at Clinton. In 1991, reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in which he documented Hewitt's own serious problems with impulse control. Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom. Correspondent Mike Wallace was singled out for bottom slapping, lewd comments and unsnapping co-workers' bras. While today no one would hesitate to call such behavior sexual harassment, Wallace's cheerful willingness to do it in public - even in front of a stranger - made him seem like a good (albeit unpleasant) old boy. But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship. One woman described to Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there and forced his tongue down her throat. Hewitt vehemently denied the story and all other allegations to Hertsgaard, while Wallace admitted his own antics and promised they would never happen again. Rolling Stone eventually published Hertsgaard's article in a drastically reduced form, although Hertsgaard says Hewitt pulled all the strings he could to get the story killed. In an interview from his home in Takoma Park, Md., Hertsgaard spoke to Salon about the allegations of sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" that never made it into print - and about how the "men's club" within the media exposes other sexually reckless men, but still protects its own. Your story has some pretty explosive accusations against Don Hewitt. How did you come to write the piece? Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation. I literally witnessed sexual harassment on my first day of interviews at "60 Minutes" and women began to tell me about it, so it gradually found its way into the story. But that wasn't the point, it just was so pervasive at the time that you couldn't miss it. What did you witness when you were there? The first day I was in the corridor talking with a female staffer and I saw out of the corner of my eye Mr. Wallace coming down the hall. He didn't know me yet because I hadn't interviewed him, so he had no idea that it was a reporter standing there. I'm sure it would have changed his mind. Anyway, just before he reached her she pushed both her hands behind her bottom, like a little kid trying to ward off a mama's spanking, and got up on her toes and leaned away. But that didn't stop him. As he went by, he swatted her on the butt with a rolled up magazine or newspaper or something like that. That's no big deal, one could say, but I must say it did raise my eyebrows. I said to her, "God, does that happen all the time?" and she said, "Are you kidding? That is nothing." And that led to people telling me how he'd also unsnap your bra strap or snap it for you. So he had a reputation for that. Then I also heard about this far-more-worrisome incident with Hewitt and that one did get into the piece, although in a much censored form, where he lunges at a woman in a deserted place, pins her against the wall and sticks his tongue in her mouth. There were other incidents women told me about Hewitt, and, of course, (former) Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn was already on the record in her book "We're Going to Make You a Star" accusing Hewitt of making an aggressive pass at her and sabotaging her work when she refused him. Was the sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" pervasive? It sure seemed that way. There's a woman quoted in my story saying that Mike would constantly have his hands on your thigh, or whatnot. One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt felt this was their right. And that's how a lot of men in television felt for many years. Women were basically hired for their looks. You had to be competent too, but you damn well better look good. I understand that you had a difficult time getting the story published in Rolling Stone. The entire piece almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill it and (Rolling Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went along with him. They did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot of the damaging material. You'll see in there that there is one basic episode involving Don. There were four that I had reported. [...] So what did you think when you saw Hewitt taking a stand for Kathleen Willey? It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times on Friday and Saturday as he was hyping Sunday's broadcast. He's talking about what happened and I just thought of that old Dylan song: "You've got a lot of nerve." I hoped somebody would call him on it. In today's Times, Patricia Ireland, head of NOW, is quoted as saying if these charges by Ms. Willey are true, it has crossed a very important line from sexual harassment to sexual assault. And if that's the case, we have to be very serious about it. Well, the situation where Hewitt stuck his tongue down that women's throat - that's assault. That is assault. She certainly felt like she was assaulted. She freed herself by kicking him in the balls - which they also cut out. She runs away and then the next day, there was a fancy gala event where you have to come in evening dress and she's there and Hewitt, this son of a gun - he's like a randy old goat - he just could not take no for an answer. She was wearing a backless gown and suddenly she feels someone running his fingers up and down her bare back. She turns around, obviously jumpy from what had happened the day before, and sees the object of her horror - Hewitt - saying, "Don't be scared, I just think you're a very attractive girl." They cut that out of the article too. There's a lot of huffing and puffing within the media about Clinton's alleged behavior, with a lot of journalists complaining about the public's so-called apathy on the subject. But in the case of men like Hewitt, it seems pretty hypocritical. It's absolutely unmistakable - and Hewitt is an extremely good example - how most of the discourse about this issue involves people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand. And that goes not just for Hewitt, but for many of these clowns both in the media here in Washington and in the Congress. Anybody who has spent any time around Capitol Hill knows that a large number of congressmen, both in the House and in the Senate, fool around with either their young staffers or the young female staffers of their colleagues. To any reporter who had their eyes open, this is not news. Carol Lloyd, A Feel For a Good Story, Mothers Who Think, 17Mar98. With respect to Carol Lloyd's statement above, I wonder if I could have your answers to just four questions: (1) Is 60 Minutes infected with a slackness of integrity? What Carol Lloyd appears to be describing in the upper echelons of the 60 Minutes administration - I am thinking particularly of executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike Wallace - is a deep-rooted slackness of integrity: the 60 Minutes environment has "more in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom," the top 60 Minutes staff are "people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand," and executive producer Don Hewitt comports himself "like a randy old goat." Might it be the case, then, that the cause of your failing to satisfy minimal journalistic standards in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, and of your failing also in the years since that broadcast to retract any of its many errors, is that you yourself became infected by the same slackness of integrity that had already gripped other of the 60 Minutes leadership? (2) Does female hiring demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice program quality? If the top 60 Minutes staff require their female employees to be physically attractive and sexually accessible, then might the resulting inability of 60 Minutes to retain women of high professional quality have resulted in a degradation in the average competence 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 < Safer 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 "Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between (what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast: The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality rates," Safer said to the television show's audience. Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists." After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to dip. The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine consumption increases life expectancy: Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said. Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other unnamed compounds in wine that contributed to higher levels of beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. 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. In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well, as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error - which is to fail to grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter. The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation. Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see that you were wrong. Below is my explanation. The French Paradox Research Cannot Have Been Experimental There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in diet, in smoking, in drug use, and so on. That is the magic of random assignment, and we cannot pause to discuss it - you will have to take my word for it. To groups that enjoy pre-treatment equality, the experimenter administers his treatment. After constituting his random groups, the experimenter would require the subjects in each group to drink different volumes of wine each day over many years - let us say over the course of 30 years. Subjects assigned to the zero-glass group would be required to drink no wine. Subjects assigned to the 1-glass group would be required to drink one glass of wine each day. Subjects assigned to the 2-glass group would be required to drink two glasses of wine each day. And so on up to, say, a 10-glass group, which given that we started with a zero-glass group gives us the 11 groups that I started out positing that we would need. As the experiment progressed, the number dying in each group as well as the cause of death, and the health of those still alive, would be monitored periodically. There are many ways in which this simplest of all experiments could be refined or elaborated, but we need not pause to discuss such complications here - what I have outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity. Such an experiment has never been conducted And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health. Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of their lives. The same at the other end of the scale - most people requested to drink large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance. And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen - and no experimenter has such resources - then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) - a conclusion that I will not pause to explain in detail. Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink substantial amounts of alcohol every day for several decades. The potential harm is readily evident. For example, drinking 10 glasses of wine per day, or even several glasses, will predispose a person to accidents. A single experimental subject who consumed several glasses of wine and then was incapacitated in an automobile accident would be all that it would take to bring such research to a halt forever. The accident victim might readily argue that the experiment requiring him to drink wine was responsible for his accident, and that the experimenter - and the university at which he worked, and the granting agency that funded his research - were liable for millions of dollars. In anticipation of no more than the possibility of such a law suit, no granting agency would fund such research, and no university or research institution would allow it to be conducted under its roof. Consuming substantial amounts of alcohol can not only cause accidents, but it can also ruin health, destroy careers, distort personalities, break up marriages - for which reason no experiment will ever require subjects to consume substantial amounts of alcohol over extended periods of time. The possibility of harm, and thus of law suits, can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him sue for damages. And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would be invalid Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in - they might not know, for example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into. A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo. In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well. The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it, confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets, exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one direction or the other. Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption. But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make their appearance in a non-double-blind experiment, that such an experiment must be considered to be fatally defective, and that no cause-effect conclusion can ever be drawn from it with confidence. Thus, no valid experiment exists. In short, we can be sure that no experiment has ever been conducted to ascertain the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on longevity, and that if such an experiment had ever been conducted, the impossibility of its being double-blind, or even blind, would render it inconclusive. The French Paradox Research Must Have Been Correlational But if the data featured in your 60 Minutes broadcast was not experimental, then what was it? It must, by default, have been correlational. That is, rather than subjects being assigned randomly to groups and being required to drink a given volume of alcohol each day, it must have been merely observed what volume of alcohol they chose to drink each day. Alcohol consumption would be measured by self-report. Well, it is not quite true that the experimenter would observe what volume of alcohol his subjects drank daily. It would be impractical to follow subjects around and actually see how much alcohol they consumed in restaurants, in bars, in their homes. Much more likely is that every once in a long while, the subjects would be mailed a questionnaire asking them to report how much alcohol they had been drinking lately. The inability to measure alcohol consumption directly is already a weakness - subjects might not remember accurately how much they had been drinking, or they might experience some pressure to distort how much they had been drinking either upward or downward. However, this is not at all the big weakness that I want to bring out, so let us get to that without further delay. We have already seen that random assignment guarantees pre-treatment equality on all dimensions. I first recapitulate that in the case of the random assignment of subjects to groups in an experiment, we were guaranteed that the subjects in each group would be initially equivalent on every conceivable dimension. The larger the random groups, the closer to being precisely equal on every conceivable dimension would they become. Thus, in a properly designed and executed double-blind experiment, any differences that subsequently arose between groups would have to be attributed to the different treatments that the experiment had administered to them - for example, if some groups lived longer than others, nothing else would be able to explain this except that some groups had consumed a different volume of wine than others. Natural assignment guarantees pre-treatment inequality on many dimensions. But in a correlational study, subjects are not assigned to groups randomly, they assign themselves to groups naturally. A subject who is in a no-wine group, for example, is one who has himself decided that he does not drink wine. Thus, the groups are referred to not as randomly constituted, but as naturally constituted, as if nature had come along and assigned each subject to one of the groups. Now here comes the really important part. It is that experience teaches us that naturally-constituted groups are capable of differing from each other on every conceivable dimension, and are highly likely to differ from each other substantially on a number of dimensions. In other words, people who drink no wine are likely to differ from people who drink several glasses of wine in many ways. Perhaps the non-drinkers will have more females, and the drinkers will have more males - or perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the drinkers will be older or younger. Perhaps the drinkers will be richer or poorer. Perhaps the drinkers will tend to be single and the teetotallers tend to be married, or vice versa. Differences may readily be discovered in height, in weight, in education. Differences could quite plausibly be discovered in smoking, in drug use, in exposure to industrial pollutants, in diet. People who drink will tend to live in different parts of the city from people who don't drink. People who drink may watch more television, use microwave ovens more, spend more time breathing automobile exhaust - or less. As people of different ethnic backgrounds, or religions, or races drink different amounts, it follows that people who drink different amounts will differ in ethnic background, in religion, and in race. One can speculate about thousands of ways in which drinkers could differ from teetotallers, and if one actually examined two such groups, one would find a few dimensions on which such extraneous differences were large, several dimensions on which such extraneous differences were moderate, and a large number of dimensions on which such extraneous differences were present but small. The hurdle that the correlational researcher is never able to overleap is that given that he is unable to look for every conceivable difference, he will never know all the ways in which his naturally-constituted groups did indeed differ from each other. Natural groups may eat different amounts of broccoli. And so then, no cause-effect conclusion will ever be possible from a correlational study. If the moderate drinkers happen to live longer, we will never be able to conclude that this is caused by their moderate drinking, because it might be caused by how close they live to high-voltage lines or how often they wash their hands or how far they drive to work or how much toothpaste they swallow or how much they salt their food or how close they sit to their televisions or how many pets they keep or whether they sleep with their windows open or whether they finish their broccoli. In an experiment, random assignment of subjects to groups guarantees equality on all such extraneous dimensions, and this makes cause-effect conclusions possible. In a correlational study, natural assignment of subjects to groups guarantees inequality on many such extraneous dimensions, and this makes cause-effect conclusions impossible. Correlation does not imply causality. Every textbook on statistics or research methodology underlines this same caveat, captured in the expression "correlation does not imply causality," which warns that from correlational data, it is impossible to tell what caused what. Science has developed only a single method for determining what caused what - and that method is the experiment. No experiment, no cause effect conclusion - it's that simple. Given correlational data, furthermore, there is no way of extracting cause-effect conclusions by more subtle or more advanced analyses - no way of equating the groups statistically, no way of matching subjects to achieve statistically the pre-treatment equality that is needed to arrive at cause-effect conclusions. Advanced methods of analyzing correlational data do exist, and are used by naive researchers, and to the layman may appear to be effective, but the reality is that all are fatally flawed, all have been demonstrated in the literature to be ineffective and to lead to inconclusive results. The bottom line is that there is no way to extract cause-effect conclusions from correlational data. You overlooked that the causal direction might be reversed. In the case of The French Paradox finding, I can readily see a plausible alternative interpretation as to how the observed data could have arisen. The data do seem to show that as drinking declines from a high to a moderate level, longevity increases. This accords with the notion that alcohol is toxic, and that its effects are deleterious. What constitutes The French Paradox, however, is that when one goes even farther along the drinking continuum from moderate drinking all the way down to no drinking at all, instead of longevity increasing still higher, the opposite happens - longevity shrinks. What distinguishes the scientifically-trained mind from that of the layman in this case is that the layman thinks of a single interpretation, and seizing on that as the only one possible, stops thinking. That is, the layman thinks "Drinking not at all is unhealthy, therefore I can improve my health by drinking." The scientifically-trained mind, in contrast, recognizes that in correlational data a large number of interpretations is possible, acknowledges the first interpretation that springs to mind as one among the many that are possible, and keeps looking, and keeps finding, a number of alternative interpretations, and ultimately acknowledges the impossibility of choosing among them. As illustrated in my own case. Specifically, I happen to find myself in a naturally-constituted zero-alcohol group. That is, I drink not at all, or very close to not at all. There is a reason for this, and that is that the effects of alcohol upon me are toxic. Mainly, I get splitting headaches, even from the ingestion of small amounts of alcohol, particularly if the alcohol comes in the form of wine. I take this to mean that my constitution is weak, that I am unable to process alcohol efficiently, that I am unable to detoxify my body of alcohol the way that others can, that my body chemistry is not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink. Please mark well what I have just done - I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol. That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking. Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case. Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies. (2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity, since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative. In short, the only research that can prove that prolonged drinking of three to five glasses of wine per day can extend life is the non-feasible experiment that we have already discussed above in which subjects are required to drink different amounts of wine over an extended period of time, and the effects on longevity noted. The Harm That You May Have Done. What the above reasoning leads us to, then, is that you were without justification for promoting the conclusion that you did - that drinking three to five glasses of wine each day extends life. Quite possibly, your conclusion had the effect of increasing the consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly wine, and possibly, the effects of this increased consumption have been uniformly bad. These may be among the damaging effects of your advice. The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate slows reaction times and interferes with coordination and impairs judgment, and therefore invites accidents. Certainly no airline pilot would be permitted to consume a fraction of your recommended daily intake and still be allowed to fly, and certainly every driver should recognize that he is putting himself at risk drinking as much as you advocate. We recognize the damage that your advice may have inflicted when we take into account that except for infants and the aging, accidents are the leading cause of death. The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate interferes with, or makes quite impossible, difficult mental work. Thus, a university student who follows your advice and has a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner is finished for the day - he might as well head out to a pub after that, because he will find his calculus homework quite incomprehensible. A chemistry professor who follows your advice and has a couple of glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself making mistakes as he tries to lay out the electron configuration of aluminum for his class - he had better find some simpler topic to treat in that lecture if he doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of his students. A lawyer arguing a complex case who follows your advice and has a couple of glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself losing the thread of his argument in court - he had better let his junior take over that afternoon if he wants to maintain his reputation. The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate may damage health. The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate possibly saps energy and depletes motivation, possibly leads to more time spent in small talk and in television viewing, and less in productive work and creative effort. Undoubtedly, the level of alcohol consumption that you advocate promotes outright alcoholism. Yours has been a call based on pseudo-science to abandon sobriety and embrace intoxication - hardly a direction that American culture needs to be pushed in. The French Paradox and The Ugly Face of Freedom were equally flawed. And to return to the comparison of your 23Oct94 broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom to your 5Nov95 broadcast The French Paradox, I do see a striking parallel. In both cases, you didn't know what you were talking about, but stepped forward and talked anyway. Given that you had not studied the subjects to which you addressed yourself, given that you had not thought about them, given that you were capable of nothing better than passing along the most superficial, man-in-the-street, off-the-top-of-my-head conclusions, the truly remarkable thing is that you would have the arrogance to think yourself worthy of standing up in front of tens of millions of people and telling them what was your opinion. Yet that is what you did, and in each case, you got it wrong. Your many conclusions in these two broadcasts ranged from totally opposite to the truth to totally unsupported by the evidence. The Ugly Face of Freedom for which you will always be remembered in the Ukrainian community was wrong and destructive. The French Paradox - which judging from its Internet prominence appears to be your best-remembered broadcast among your total audience - was also wrong, and also destructive. A word concerning self-help. If you yourself subscribe to the prescription of drinking three to five glasses of wine each day, then I would recommend that you attempt to break yourself of the habit, and substitute for the many hours of inebriation thus avoided some sober study. Had you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober reading of history, you might have spared yourself the fiasco of The Ugly Face of Freedom. Had you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober study of scientific method, you might have spared yourself the fiasco of The French Paradox. Perhaps you have no more than to look at these two pratfalls in your own career to see how damaging is the effect of making a habit of indulging in alcohol. Disclosure would be a step toward restoring professional credibility. As enthusiasm for your French Paradox broadcasts seems to have its source in the wine industry, and as your integrity has been brought into question on the matter of The Ugly Face of Freedom, I wonder if your professional standing would not be enhanced by your assuring 60 Minutes viewers that you have received no benefits from the wine industry in gratitude for the increased sales that your French Paradox broadcasts have brought it. The absence of such an assurance will invite some 60 Minutes viewers to construe your French Paradox broadcasts more as infomercials than as investigative reporting. Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER < Safer Safer > 1553 hits since 26Apr99 Morley Safer Letter 8 26Apr99 One out of 40 escaped shooting It looks very much, Mr. Safer, as if on your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly Face of Freedom, your chief witness testifying to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis was himself a war criminal of substantial proportions, a former Gestapo agent with the blood of many on his hands, perhaps much of it Jewish blood. April 26, 1999 Morley Safer 60 Minutes, CBS Television 51 W 52nd Street New York, NY USA 10019 Morley Safer: I bring to your attention the following excerpt from an article by L. A. Ruvinsky published in the Ukrainian Historical Journal in 1985: After the end of the Second World War, the former head of the Lviv Gestapo, P. Krause, replying to a question put by the writer V. P. Bieliaev, testified: "If on our side, in the Gestapo, there had not worked several agents from among the Zionists, we would never have been able to capture and destroy such a large number of Jews, who were living under false documents and assumed names." For example, in July 1941, Zionist Simon Wiesenthal, together with 39 other representatives of the Lviv intelligentsia, found himself in prison. Somehow, as a result of a "mysterious confluence of circumstances" all the arrested except for himself were shot, and he was freed. It is not surprising that after this, this Zionist provocateur became a regular Nazi agent. Polish journalists have established this as an indisputable fact. That is why the Hitlerites did not throw Wiesenthal into prison, which he frequently confirms, but rather sent him there to organize subsequent provocations. Evidently he was not lying when he said that he passed through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps. In any case, it is not difficult to imagine how many innocent victims are on the conscience of this impenitent Zionist provocateur. It is such loathsome services for the Fascist killers that were performed in the Yanivsky concentration camp, in which people of various nationalities found themselves - Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. L. A. Ruvinsky, The criminal conspiracy of Zionists and Fascists on the eve of, and during the years of, the Second World War, Ukrainian Historical Journal, 1985, No. 9, pp. 99-109, p. 105, translated from the Ukrainian by Lubomyr Prytulak. The above statement, by itself, is certainly insufficient to establish that Simon Wiesenthal passed the war years as a Gestapo agent. However, it is - even by itself - sufficient to lead an investigative journalist to ask Mr. Wiesenthal certain questions: (1) Was Simon Wiesenthal in fact arrested along with 39 other members of the Lviv intelligentsia? (2) Was Simon Wiesenthal the only one of the 40 who avoided execution? (3) Did Simon Wiesenthal pass through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps? (4) How could Simon Wiesenthal have avoided execution, and how could he have passed through so many Nazi institutions, unless he had agreed to serve as a Gestapo agent? Had you asked Mr. Wiesenthal any such questions in your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly Face of Freedom, you would have taken a step toward digging underneath the surface, a step of the sort that some 60 Minutes viewers have come to expect as standard from investigative journalists. I bring to your attention further that the above quotation from Ruvinsky is not the only reason that we have for thinking that Simon Wiesenthal may have worked for the Gestapo. Further reasons can be found in my following three letters to Simon Wiesenthal: (1) 15Dec94 in which I ask Simon Wiesenthal, among other things, why he kept detailed notes on the Polish partisans who were sheltering him, and why he allowed these notes to be captured by the Nazis. (2) 14Aug97 in which I ask Simon Wiesenthal why the Nazis allowed him, a Jew and supposedly a prisoner, to keep two pistols. (3) 28Aug97 in which I ask Simon Wiesenthal why, where other prisoners were shot upon being recaptured following their escape, he was instead relieved from work and put on double rations. It looks very much, Mr. Safer, as if on your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly Face of Freedom, your chief witness testifying to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis was himself a war criminal of substantial proportions, a former Gestapo agent with the blood of many on his hands, perhaps much of it Jewish blood, and who may have used your interview with him to cast blame on Ukrainians so as to deflect attention away from his own guilt. If this blunder of yours is allowed to stand, then it threatens in the end to be remembered as your chief legacy to 60 Minutes. Would it not be better to finally break your long silence and by embracing truth to make some attempt to redeem your reputation? Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace,