Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

behavior.

(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263)

HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98

T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility

The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several

million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The Guardian

reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to London was

paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's dramatic

moments were faked.

The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post

article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the

relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs:

Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug

smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who

cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities

which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their

crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident

principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC

television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity

of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing

Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news

sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same

as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity

that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making

public confession of their crimes.

Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes

broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable

incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their

crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed

to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies

lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do

not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom.

The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of

such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different.

In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a

fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the

ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and

that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly

Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again

that it advanced Israeli interests.

North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have

three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post

article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a

dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one

another's reporting" and contrasts this with the United States where "newspapers and TV

networks generally don't go on the attack against the other guy's story." (ii) The

British government's Independent Commission requires TV news to demonstrate "a respect

for truth," whereas in the United States, the accuracy of news reporting is not subject

to any official review. (iii) We see Israel Shahak repeatedly offering the observation

that North American news shows a unique degree of submission to Jewish control, as for

example in the following statement:

The bulk of the organized US Jewish community is totalitarian,

chauvinistic and militaristic in its views. This fact remains

unnoticed by other Americans due to its control of the media, but is

apparent to some Israeli Jews. As long as organized US Jewry remained

united, its control over the media and its political power remained

unchallenged. (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and

Foreign Policies, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1997, p. 139).

CBS News Does Not Investigate Itself. Although an admission from 60 Minutes seems

imminent that its story of The Mule was fraudulent, CBS did not discover this fraud,

and is not undertaking any investigation of its own. Rather, there appear to be a

"series of investigations," possibly all British, including one by Carlton Television

which originally financed and broadcast the documentary, and including a study by the

British government. One may hypothesize, then, that CBS does not place high priority

on the acknowledgement and correction of its own errors, and that it will do so only

when forced to by public disclosure of these errors by some other agency. For this

reason, the acknowledgement by 60 Minutes that its story The Mule was entirely

fraudulent cannot be taken as offering hope that CBS is any closer to acknowledging

that its story The Ugly Face of Freedom was entirely fraudulent.

American Competence Gap? Mention has often been made in the Ukrainian Archive

of the existence of competence gaps as these relate to brain drains and gains. The

observation of a startling degree of credulity in the highest levels of the American

Press constitutes one such competence gap, although in this case it is not a gap that

leads to any brain theft from other nations, as the gap is largely hidden from the

American public. Perhaps the American public has its own competence gap - one in which

the people watching the news are as blind to incongruities as the people who are

broadcasting it.

Below are excerpts only. The complete Washington Post article is purchasable online

from the Washington Post by anyone who cares to first set up an account with the

Washington Post.

Acclaimed Expose Questioned as Hoax

British Drug Documentary Was Featured on "60 Minutes"

By T.R. Reid

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, May 9, 1998; Page A01

LONDON, May 8 - That powerful expose on "60 Minutes" last summer about Colombian drug

runners was [...] quite possibly, false.

After a lengthy investigation, London's Guardian newspaper has charged that the

award-winning documentary "The Connection" [...] was essentially fiction.

The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several

million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The

Guardian reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to

London was paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's

dramatic moments were faked.

[...]

When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule

had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach.

"Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said.

But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed

Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and

was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at

Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain.

[...]

The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed

guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a

high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to

travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous.

The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in

Colombia.

[...]

The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has

launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power

to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring

that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth."

CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on

the results of the British investigations [...].

HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98

Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar

Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a

breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern

journalism.

The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive

because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on

the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate

them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust

fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph

of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast

over the CBS network on 23Oct94.

From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence

of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that

distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or

Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate.

The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests

otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are

rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval

eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less

of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the

powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,

but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the

viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is

widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented

throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but

rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is

largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to

truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.

Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some

sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in

lying.

The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,

September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in

navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the

original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new

understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other

record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian