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look good.

I understand that you had a difficult time getting the story

published in Rolling Stone.

The entire piece almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill

it and (Rolling Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went

along with him. They did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot

of the damaging material. You'll see in there that there is one

basic episode involving Don. There were four that I had reported.

[...]

So what did you think when you saw Hewitt taking a stand for

Kathleen Willey?

It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times on Friday

and Saturday as he was hyping Sunday's broadcast. He's talking

about what happened and I just thought of that old Dylan song:

"You've got a lot of nerve."

I hoped somebody would call him on it. In today's Times, Patricia

Ireland, head of NOW, is quoted as saying if these charges by Ms.

Willey are true, it has crossed a very important line from sexual

harassment to sexual assault. And if that's the case, we have to be

very serious about it. Well, the situation where Hewitt stuck his

tongue down that women's throat - that's assault. That is assault.

She certainly felt like she was assaulted. She freed herself by

kicking him in the balls - which they also cut out. She runs away

and then the next day, there was a fancy gala event where you have

to come in evening dress and she's there and Hewitt, this son of a

gun - he's like a randy old goat - he just could not take no for an

answer. She was wearing a backless gown and suddenly she feels

someone running his fingers up and down her bare back. She turns

around, obviously jumpy from what had happened the day before, and

sees the object of her horror - Hewitt - saying, "Don't be scared, I

just think you're a very attractive girl." They cut that out of the

article too.

There's a lot of huffing and puffing within the media about

Clinton's alleged behavior, with a lot of journalists complaining

about the public's so-called apathy on the subject. But in the case

of men like Hewitt, it seems pretty hypocritical.

It's absolutely unmistakable - and Hewitt is an extremely good

example - how most of the discourse about this issue involves people

who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my

hand. And that goes not just for Hewitt, but for many of these

clowns both in the media here in Washington and in the Congress.

Anybody who has spent any time around Capitol Hill knows that a

large number of congressmen, both in the House and in the Senate,

fool around with either their young staffers or the young female

staffers of their colleagues. To any reporter who had their eyes

open, this is not news.

Carol Lloyd, A Feel For a Good Story, Mothers Who Think, 17Mar98.

With respect to Carol Lloyd's statement above, I wonder if I could have your answers

to just four questions:

(1) Is 60 Minutes infected with a slackness of integrity? What Carol Lloyd appears to be

describing in the upper echelons of the 60 Minutes administration - I am thinking

particularly of executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike Wallace - is a

deep-rooted slackness of integrity: the 60 Minutes environment has "more in common

with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom," the top 60 Minutes staff are

"people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand," and

executive producer Don Hewitt comports himself "like a randy old goat." Might it be

the case, then, that the cause of your failing to satisfy minimal journalistic

standards in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, and of your

failing also in the years since that broadcast to retract any of its many errors, is

that you yourself became infected by the same slackness of integrity that had already

gripped other of the 60 Minutes leadership?

(2) Does female hiring demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice program quality? If the

top 60 Minutes staff require their female employees to be physically attractive and

sexually accessible, then might the resulting inability of 60 Minutes to retain women

of high professional quality have resulted in a degradation in the average competence

of female employees? One may speak of demanding competence together with beauty, but

what woman of high competence would have hesitated to find alternative employment

upon discovering the harassment and assault and career strangulation that threatened

to be her lot if she remained at 60 Minutes? And so, in turn, might this readiness

to lose the brightest women not be symptomatic of a readiness of the 60 Minutes

administration to place extraneous goals - in this case, personal sexual

gratification - above program quality? And might this same policy of demoting

program quality to less than top priority have ultimately resulted in a severe

degradation of the quality of some 60 Minutes broadcasts, as for example your story

The Ugly Face of Freedom?

(3) Does male hiring demonstrate any similar willingness to sacrifice program quality?

One cannot help contemplating that if 60 Minutes is willing to promote goals other

than program quality in its hiring of female employees, that it might be willing to

promote goals other than program quality in its hiring of male employees as well.

Might it be the case, for example, that male employees are sometimes hired not for

competence, but for adherence to a 60 Minutes ideology? Or might it be the case that

men of high professional quality left 60 Minutes, or refused to join 60 Minutes, upon

witnessing the ideological claptrap that they might be asked to read over the air in

violation of journalistic ethics and in violation of rules of evidence? This too

could help explain the low quality of The Ugly Face of Freedom.

(4) Do some 60 Minutes employees feel that malfeasance is their right? Referring to the

harassment and assaulting of female employees, reporter Mark Hertsgaard is quoted as

saying that "One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt felt this

was their right." This observation leads me to wonder whether there is not on the

part of certain 60 Minutes staff some similar attitude to the effect that

broadcasting their prejudices against Ukraine as facts is their right, and that

enjoying freedom from accountability concerning what they have broadcast about

Ukraine is also their right?

Lubomyr Prytulak

cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl,

Mike Wallace.

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 965 hits since 21Apr99

Morley Safer Letter 7 21Apr99 Does drinking wine promote longevity?

At bottom, then, I see little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and

your Ugly Face of Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your

depth, giving superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on,

discussing questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing

damage because your conclusions proved to be false.

April 21, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I find your photograph. Recently, I was searching the internet looking for a photograph

of you that I could use on the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR), and I did manage to find an

attractive one, and I did put it on UKAR, as you can see at:

http://www.ukar.org/safer.shtml

I attach to it a caption. Underneath this photograph I selected from the many

ill-considered things that you said in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face

of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its

poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must

convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian

that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were

more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a

moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this

statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and

that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it

were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or

unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm

upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining

your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.

What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,

concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a

surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The

discovery is that your name seems to be most closely connected to the conclusion that

drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you

proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The

French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may

constitute the pinnacle of your career.

For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for

"Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine

Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger

Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that

the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in

a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article

viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between

(what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your

own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast

audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption

shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:

The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to

people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What

surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality

rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.

Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine

drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was

seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said

John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the

credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."

After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the

consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to

dip.

The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine

consumption increases life expectancy:

Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is

linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about