ГУЛаг Палестины

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 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