ГУЛаг Палестины

was defective, it is dangerous, it must be recalled.

Acknowledging that Ukrainians are upset or that they are protesting is not a correction, it is

not a retraction, and it is not an apology. Directing attention to Ukrainian feelings is 60

Minutes' way of deflecting attention away from its own negligence.

60 Minutes has valiantly investigated and exposed hundreds of corrupt, or merely erring, people

and institutions - the time has come to turn the focus inwards and to investigate and expose

itself. Of course this can only be done objectively by an external investigator relying on his

or her own independent staff. Inviting such an external investigator to do a 60 Minutes story

is the right thing to do; it will be appreciated and admired; it will raise 60 Minutes'

integrity from its currently lowered position to a new pinnacle. Damage control won't work. If

60 Minutes really wants respect, it should broadcast a story on itself and call it "The Ugly

Face of 60 Minutes."

As the misinformation that was planted in the original twelve-minute segment will take longer

than twelve minutes to uproot, 60 Minutes should devote an entire nominal sixty minutes to its

correction, retraction, and apology - only such a substantial allocation of time can begin to

undo the damage. At the other extreme, a correction, retraction, and apology confined to

Mailbag will be next to worthless.

(2) 60 Minutes should upgrade its research library by acquiring at least the two-volume

Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, the five-volume Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Orest Subtelny's

Ukraine: A History, and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. This seems a

modest investment to plug a huge and dangerous gap in awareness.

(3) But books are nothing if they are sitting on the shelves of biased researchers. Find out

who contributed to the travesty of "The Ugly Face of Freedom" and get rid of them. And don't

worry about their careers - with their special talents, they will be able to get good jobs with

supermarket tabloids writing about sightings of Elvis Presley and UFO landings.

(4) 60 Minutes should examine with a more skeptical eye materials concerning Ukrainians, and

concerning Eastern Europeans generally, that come from biased sources. As a minimal step, 60

Minutes could adopt the rule of thumb that anyone who considers Eastern Europeans to be

sub-human might better be assigned to some other topic.

(5) 60 Minutes should not be afraid to consult sources capable of balancing a biased story.

There are a large number of historians and other academics (some of whom are Ukrainian or East

European, some of whom are Jewish, some of whom are both, some of whom are neither) that could

have told 60 Minutes at a glance that "The Ugly Face of Freedom" was bunkum.

(6) 60 Minutes should rethink its heavy-handed reliance on the gimmick of interviewing by

ambush by means of which the side favored by 60 Minutes is apprised in advance of the nature of

the interview, has a chance to organize his thoughts, and comes out looking good whereas the

side ambushed is misled into believing that the interview will be supportive, but then is hit

with questions that are hostile and for which he is unprepared. The ambushed interviewee is

discomposed, flustered, fumbles in trying to collect his thoughts, the camera zooms in on his

confusion, and he appears duplicitous. It may be a tried-and-true formula, but it doesn't fool

every viewer and constitutes poor journalism in the case where the interviewee is innocent,

where he would have granted the interview even if he hadn't been misled as to its intent, and

where nothing more damning is extracted from him other than his consternation at having been

betrayed.

(7) In order to permit the viewer to verify the accuracy of a 60-Minutes translation, the

original statement should remain audible and not be muted to the point of unintelligibility, and

transcripts provided by 60 Minutes should include the original of any statements that had been

broadcast in translation.

(8) 60 Minutes should rely on professional translators with accredited competence in the

original language who might be counted on to provide an undistorted translation. Particularly,

60 Minutes should expect that if it relies on a Russian who merely claims that he understands

Ukrainian, it is inviting the sort of biased mistranslation that it did in fact get in its

broadcast.

(9) 60 Minutes should not tackle a complex, multi-faceted story unless it is willing to invest

sufficient resources to get it right. In a typical 60 Minutes story say the exposing of a

single corrupt individual - the number of issues involved, and the amount of data that is

relevant, is small, can be gathered with a modest research outlay, and can readily be contained

within a 12-minute segment. "The Ugly Face of Freedom," in contrast, presented conclusions on a

dozen topics any one of which would require the full resources of a single typical 60 Minutes

story to present fairly - and so, little wonder that most of these conclusions turned out to be

wrong.

(10) 60 Minutes should heighten its awareness of the distinction between raw data and

tenth-hand rumor. A hospital administrator examining a document and explaining how he knows

that it is a forgery is raw data from which 60 Minutes might be justified in extracting some

conclusion; that Symon Petliura slaughtered 60,000 Jews is a tenth-hand rumor which 60 Minutes