1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: "The Ugly Face": CBS on Ukrainians (12/31/95)

1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

"The Ugly Face": CBS on Ukrainians

If the Ukrainian American diaspora coalesced around anything this year it was the airing of a segment of the popular CBS program "60 Minutes" called "The Ugly Face of Freedom." It was widely condemned for alluding to Ukrainians as "genetically anti-Semitic."

With the filing of a slew of complaints and appeals with the Federal Communications Commission and the United States Court of Appeals, the brouhaha that began immediately after the broadcast on October 23, 1994 stayed on the pages of The Weekly for all of 1995.

In December 1994 Alexander Serafyn filed a petition with the FCC to disallow CBS a broadcasting license in the Detroit viewing area based on the "60 Minutes" segment.

It was the second suit brought against CBS; the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America had filed a personal attack complaint shortly after the broadcast in 1994.

Mr. Serafyn, a retired Ford Motor Co. executive from Troy, Mich., which is part of the Detroit viewing area, alleged in his petition that the TV newsmagazine "distorted facts, quoted speakers out of context and unfairly translated words from Ukrainian into English, all in an effort to support the show's false conclusions." His petition stated that the granting of a license to CBS for these reasons would not be in "the public interest, convenience and necessity and should be denied." CBS had purchased a UHF station, WGPR, and was attempting to obtain a transfer of license after its VHF affiliate had moved to the Fox Broadcasting Network

Arthur Belendiuk, attorney for Mr. Serafyn and a communications expert, who helped spur the effort against CBS, said, "You can't just make stuff up out of whole cloth, broadcast it and then, when people point that out to you, say, well, we don't care; we're going to stand by our story... and, by the way, get ready for the rerun season."

On February 17, Mr. Belendiuk explained that three options were available to the FCC in dealing with the matter: it could dismiss the petition and grant CBS the local broadcast license; it could act on the petition and set it for a hearing; or it could grant the petition based on the evidence and deny the license. Mr. Belendiuk suggested that the FCC would order a hearing.

An attorney for CBS, Howard Jaeckel, who kept tight-lipped about the proceedings during their course, did offer comment when contacted in February, underscoring that CBS was not willing to settle under a stipulation that the network agree not to rebroadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom." He added that CBS stood by its statement that the segment was a fair and accurate portrayal of Jewish-Ukrainian relations in Ukraine.

The official CBS reply to the FCC said in part that the petition "presented no extrinsic evidence of a conscious effort to deceive the public."

As the battle over the "60 Minutes" piece was drawn, response to the airing kept on. Corporate sponsors from some of America's largest firms contacted CBS to record their concerns with the broadcasting giant. They were: General Motors Corp., Merrill Lynch, Allstate Insurance Co., United Parcel Service, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. and Wal-Mart Stores. AT&T joined that group in June, when it replied to an individual who had complained to them for advertising on the show by saying that it would not air advertising if the CBS segment was to be re-broadcast, a move repeated by IBM in July.

Several of the corporations had responded to correspondence from UCCA President Askold Lozynskyj, who expressed to them his view that the segment was "blatantly defamatory, attain[ing] new levels of journalistic irresponsibility... and maliciously racist."

Jewish leaders from around the world also expressed their dismay at the obvious disregard for the truth shown by the presentation. Yaakov Dov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kyiv, especially, maintained a public dialogue that life for Jews in Ukraine had improved remarkably since Ukraine's statehood in 1991. In February The Weekly printed a statement by the chief rabbi to 115 Jewish American newspapers explaining the reality of the situation in Ukraine. Attached was a cover letter from the American Jewish Committee's Project Ukraine Director David Roth that said, "In short, '60 Minutes' took a complex situation and presented it in a way that was a disservice to Ukraine's Jews..."

The Weekly also obtained and carried in its February 19 issue the unedited transcript of the interview between Rabbi Bleich and CBS correspondent Morley Safer. On board, too, with condemnation was Rabbi David Lincoln of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York.

For his effort at attempting to destroy Jewish-Ukrainian relations, the board of directors of the Ukrainian American Justice Committee conferred on Mr. Safer the Walter Duranty Award for Journalistic Dissimulation. Walter Duranty was the English-born Moscow correspondent of The New York Times who, in 1932 and 1933, denied that a famine was occurring in Ukraine. The longtime "60 Minutes correspondent was a no-show at the award presentation on April 9 in Chicago. He did not send regrets.

The UAJC also published a 40-page indictment of the events surrounding the broadcast in a booklet called "Scourging of a Nation: CBS and the Defamation of Ukraine."

Other Ukrainian groups, too, kept the heat on CBS. In Los Angeles representatives of the Ukrainian community met on December 14, 1994, with KCBS-TV Vice-President and General Manager William Applegate and Community Affairs Director Joseph Dyer. KCBS suggested that a program on the true state of affairs of Ukrainian-Jewish relations could be broadcast on a weekend news and public affairs program titled "Bob Navarro's Journal."

In Jersey City, N.J., the Ukrainian Heritage Defense Committee, an affiliation of the Ukrainian National Association, generated an ad that appeared on the editorial page of the April 3 editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the April 10 edition of The Post's national weekly. The ad campaign was financed by donations.

The ad seemed to have an immediate effect. Four days later, David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, received a letter from Mr. Safer in which the reporter wrote that a follow-up story that would focus on the efforts the Ukrainian government has made to combat anti-Semitism may just be a good idea. We're still waiting for that report.

On June 4 another misleading bit of information flowing through the media on Ukrainian-Jewish relations was stemmed when the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York agreed to withdraw an ad campaign it had sponsored that implied continued anti-Semitism in Ukraine, specifically in the city of Kharkiv. Pressure was brought to bear on the group by Ukrainian American organizations after several ads and radio spots had appeared in the New York area. In canceling the ad, UJA-Fed Executive Vice-President Stephen Solender said, "We felt that the advertising had been accurate several years ago, but that conditions were changing."

In Canada, too, there was action. In October the Edmonton-based affiliate of the Canadian CTV network televised an apology for having carried the defamatory CBS piece. Television station CFRN also agreed to help Ukrainian Canadians prepare a program to balance out the damage done by the CBS segment. Earlier in the year the Global CanWest network had issued a written apology to complainants "for any hurt or prejudice that the broadcast caused the Ukrainian community," and pledged not to rebroadcast the segment.

Even though the effort to keep the record straight on Jewish life in Ukraine seemed to be making some headway in the public relations area, little forward movement occurred in the area of jurisprudence.

A February 8 ruling by the FCC rejected the UCCA's personal attack complaint on the grounds that it could not find a group "as large as 1.5 million Ukrainian Americans to be an identifiable group" under the FCC's personal attack rules. The UCCA, undeterred, shot right back with an appeal contending that 1.5 million Ukrainian Americans is clearly an identifiable group and that "the ruling denies every ethnic group in the U.S. the right to object to heinous closures against their ancestry and heritage."

A North Smitsfield, R.I. man, Oleg Nikolyszyn, jumped in with a petition against CBS, which his attorney Bohdanna Pochoday filed with the FCC, to block the transfer of a license from its WLNE-TV, its affiliate in Providence, to a station it was attempting to purchase outright, WPRI-TV.

The petition mentioned some of the same points brought up by Mr. Serafyn, but stressed that CBS, by broadcasting "The Ugly Face of Freedom," has shown that CBS has not met the special needs of the Ukrainian American community. "No station license can be assigned unless public convenience and necessity and public goodwill are benefited," said Ms. Pochoday. The petition also asked that the FCC rule on the Nikolyszyn case after a decision was brought regarding the Serafyn action, a request that the FCC granted in July. However, the decision also approved a conditional transfer of license, subject to the decision in the Detroit case.

Rep. David Bonior, Democratic minority whip, and Rep. Sander Levin entered the fray when they called for hearings on the CBS mess before the FCC. On June 23, Rep. Bonior wrote the FCC chairman requesting that it be made part of the record that he feels public hearings should be held in both the Serafyn and Nikolyszyn cases. He told The Weekly in an exclusive interview, "The story was deeply offensive to those of us of Ukrainian ancestry. Portraying us as 'genetically anti-Semitic' and 'uneducated peasants, deeply superstitious' is untrue."

Unmoved by pressure brought to bear from a Democratic leader upon an FCC that contains a majority of Democrats, in early August the commission rejected outright the Nikolyszyn and Serafyn petitions. The FCC decision said it has long ruled "that it will not attempt to judge the accuracy of broadcast news reports to determine whether a reporter should have included additional facts." It also said that the two petitioners had to show that news distortion to which they alluded must have arisen from the actions of CBS in preparing the report and not from the contents itself.

Attorney Belendiuk told The Weekly, "Again [the FCC] asked the wrong question. The question is whether we provided enough evidence to set the matter for hearing and not whether we proved our case." Attorneys for both petitioners said they would appeal the decisions to the U.S Federal Court of Appeals.

At the same time the FCC rejected the appeal the UCCA had made for reconsideration of its personal attack complaint. Here the ruling supported the original decision and added that the CBS segment referred to persons residing in Ukraine and not to Ukrainian Americans. The UCCA filed for reconsideration of the rejection on August 18.

Ukrainian Americans kept the heat turned up on September 1 when the UCCA filed yet another petition with the FCC challenging the license of CBS radio station WARW-FM in Bethesda, Md. The UCCA applied to operate a new, non-commercial, educational station, which documents stated would meet the needs of "all ethnic groups living in its service area."

A separate issue, but one also involving CBS and its now infamous "60 Minutes" segment, arose when the Ukrainian-American Community Network sent a letter on September 19 to the FCC alleging that CBS, contrary to earlier assertions, had not replied to a single one of 16,000 letters of complaint regarding the 60 "Minutes" piece. In February the UACN had filed a petition against the CBS affiliate in Washington, WUSA-TV, after it was discovered the station was not properly handling letters of complaint it had received.

WUSA admitted that it had not kept the letters in a public inspection file, but had sent them to CBS headquarters in New York, as was usual for all CBS-initiated programming. WUSA, in a questionnaire it was required to fill out by the FCC, went so far as to question whether letters had actually been sent to it, as UACN coordinator Larissa Fontana had asserted.

The controversy broadened on July 17 when Ray Faiola, director of audience services for CBS in New York, responded to requests from WUSA for the letters by stating that they all had been sent to long-term storage and were unavailable. Mr. Faiola also mailed a copy of a letter he alleged had been sent to all who had written in. After the UACN and UCCA did some investigating and could turn up not a single CBS letter of response, CBS changed its stance and maintained that only 25 percent of those writing in were sent responses.

Attorney Belendiuk, who had taken on the UACN legal action also, questioned whether a letter such as that Mr. Faiola spoke of even existed. "Based on the information... the CBS letter is a fraud," he said.

In an official reply to the letter submitted by Mr. Belendiuk on behalf of Mr. Serafyn and the UCCA charging CBS with misrepresentation and fraud, CBS admitted to the FCC that human error was responsible for the company's failure to mail responses. Mr. Faiola of CBS audience services put the blame squarely on himself and explained that the responses were prepared but never sent. CBS maintained that Mr. Faiola simply forgot to mail the letters.

To which Mr. Belendiuk replied in The Weekly: "It is our contention that these letters were never sent to long-term storage; any long-term storage that precludes the possibility of retrieval is, for all practical purposes, a dumpster."

The FCC ended up siding with CBS, finding that the company has no obligation to respond to viewer's complaints, and that in its estimation it was negligence on the part of a single employee.

Positive results began appearing on the legal front in the yearlong struggle with CBS in December when the FCC finally handed down a decision favorable to Ukrainian Americans. On December 5 it notified WUSA that it was being fined $2,000 for failing to keep an updated public inspection record. Although seemingly merely a slap on the wrist, Mr. Belendiuk was satisfied. He said the ruling was a determination by the FCC that WUSA was guilty of improprieties. "This is clearly a black mark on their record, and that stays with them." He did say that he would appeal the low amount of the forfeiture.

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