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
Gestapo agent.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function