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
is incompetent to evaluate and which might constitute disinformation placed by a
special-interest group intent on hijacking a story and forcing it to travel in an unwanted
direction.
(11) 60 Minutes should ask Mr. Safer to resign. Mr. Safer's conduct was unprofessional,
irresponsible, vituperative. Mr. Safer has demonstrated an inability to distinguish impartial
reporting from rabid hatemongering and as a result has no place in mainstream journalism. He
has lost his credibility.
Mr. Safer, too, will be welcomed by the supermarket tabloids where he will find the heavy burden
of logic and consistency considerably lightened, and the constraints of having to make his words
correspond to the facts mercifully relaxed.
(12) 60 Minutes should do a story on Simon Wiesenthal and assign it to a reporter and to
researchers who have the courage to consider objectively such politically-incorrect but arguable
conclusions as that Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are self-contradictory and fantastic, that his
denunciations have sometimes proven to be irresponsible, and that he spent the war years as a
