Complaint alleges CBS mishandled viewers' letters (10/01/95)

Complaint alleges CBS mishandled viewers' letters

by Roman Woronowycz

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Yet another controversy has developed stemming from the CBS "60 Minutes" segment "The Ugly Face of Freedom." A letter was sent to the Federal Communications Commission by an attorney for the Ukrainian-American Community Network stating that, contrary to its assertions, CBS has not responded to any of the 16,000 letters it had received from viewers shocked and angered by the way in which the program portrayed Ukrainians, essentially alluding to them as "anti-Semitic." It is part of a complaint filed in February by the UACN against WUSA-TV of Washington after it was discovered that the station was not properly handling letters of complaint regarding the CBS segment.

The September 19 letter to Norman Goldstein, chief of the Complaints and Investigation Branch of the FCC, from attorney Arthur Belendiuk, acting as counsel to the UACN, states, "Based on the information... the CBS letter is a fraud." He explains that none of the people he had contacted who said they had written CBS after the program aired in October 1994, had received a letter such as CBS had explained was sent. He goes on, "As of the date of this letter, neither counsel nor any Ukrainian organization that [Mr. Belendiuk] or members of the UACN have spoken to has been able to find a single copy of the 4,000 letters WUSA claims CBS sent."

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which has asked its members to respond as to whether they ever received a letter from CBS, also says that "to date the UCCA has yet to encounter anyone who has received the letter."

The controversy began in February of this year when Larissa Fontana, coordinator of UACN, went to WUSA, a CBS affiliate that had aired "The Ugly Face of Freedom," to review the public inspection file and found that the letter she had written to complain about the CBS broadcast was not there. After filing a complaint with the FCC on February 18 against WUSA for not properly maintaining its public inspection files, she kept in contact with WUSA Director of Community Affairs Khalim Piankhi, who eventually told her that her letter and other complaints about the "60 Minutes" broadcast slurring Ukrainians had been sent to CBS network headquarters in New York, as is customary for all CBS initiated programming.

Although WUSA-TV has admitted that it failed to meet its obligation to retain comments from the public, it stated in a questionnaire, which the FCC required that WUSA submit, that "because the letter from Ms. Fontana was not in the file, we cannot confirm that we actually received it." However, in the complaint Ms. Fontana states that she sent not one but three letters, none of which is in the public file. The UACN says that it has identified 15 individuals who wrote the Washington station, none of whose letters were found in the public files.

The controversy broadened on July 17 when Ray Faiola, director of audience services for CBS, responded to WUSA TV's Mr. Piankhi regarding the whereabouts of the files sent to New York by stating that all letters regarding "The Freedom" segment "have been sent to long-term storage" and "it would be impossible for my staff to retrieve letters sent by WUSA." Mr. Faiola also attached a copy of the text of the response he alleges he sent to viewers who had written in about the segment.

When contacted, Mr. Faiola referred The Weekly to the CBS legal department, which did not return the paper's phone calls.

After inquiries were made in the Ukrainian American community by both UACN and WUSA-TV attorneys to determine if anybody had actually received the correspondence, CBS amended its claim and said that it had only responded to 25 percent of the letters, or about 4,000.

The veracity of the latest claim also is being questioned by Ukrainian American leaders. Both the UACN and the UCCA are currently searching for anybody who may have received correspondence from CBS in response to correspondence they submitted after viewing "The Ugly Face of Freedom."

| Home Page |