Turning the pages back... August 11, 1998 (08/08/99)

Turning the pages back...

August 11, 1998

One year ago, the Ukrainian community won a significant victory in its battle with CBS over the controversial "60 Minutes" segment called "The Ugly Face of Freedom," as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that there were serious questions about whether CBS intentionally distorted information in its report aired on October 23, 1994. (The parties in that case reached a settlement in April of this year. See The Weekly, May 2, 1999.)

The Ukrainian Weekly reported the following about that crucial development in the nearly four-year-old case.

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The federal appeals court ruled on August 11 that the Federal Communications Commission "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in denying a petition for a hearing on the issue of whether CBS engaged in news distortion when it broadcast the segment, which purported to uncover rampant anti-Semitism in Ukraine. The FCC made its decision "without analyzing more precisely the evidence" presented, the court said, as it vacated the FCC's decision and ordered that federal agency to review the matter.

Significantly, the appellants, Alexander J. Serafyn et al, showed that CBS did not have a policy against news distortion. As noted in the appeals court's decision, "Serafyn also submitted evidence that '60 Minutes' had no policy against news distortion and indeed that management considered some distortion acceptable."

Proof that the network considered some degree of distortion admissable consisted of articles published in the press in which both long-time "60 Minutes" reporter Mike Wallace and the program's executive producer Don Hewitt reflect on deception as a tool used by "60 Minutes." The court found that the FCC "failed to discuss or even to mention this evidence," and that this "failure to discuss Serafyn's allegation relating to CBS's policy on veracity is therefore troubling."

The court also referred in its decision to CBS's misrepresentation of the views of Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine, "when it broadcast his statements without making clear the context in which they were spoken and without including the qualifications and positive statements that accompanied them"; as well as to the broadcaster's misrepresentation to interview subjects of the segment's intent, as "for example, Cardinal [Myroslav Ivan] Lubachivsky [primate of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church] charged that the producers misled him as to the nature of the show."

It referred also to the mistranslation of the word "Zhyd" (Jew) as "kike," noting: "when the word chosen by the translator is an inflammatory term such as 'kike,' the licensee could be expected to assure itself of the accuracy of the translation; if it does not do so, the commission may appropriately consider that fact in reaching a conclusion about the broadcaster's intent to distort the news."

Source: "Ukrainians win a round in case against CBS" by Roma Hadzewycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, August 16, 1998 (Vol. LXVI, No. 33).

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