torted news by staging insurance investigator's interrogation
of fraudulent claimant; because she "actually did participate
in the fraud and did confess, even if not in precisely the
manner portrayed, the 'basic accuracy of the events reported'
... has not been distorted").
As we noted in Galloway, the Commission's policy makes
its investigation of an allegation of news distortion "extremely
limited [in] scope. But within the constraints of the Constitu
tion, Congress and the Commission may set the scope of
broadcast regulation; it is not the role of this court to
question the wisdom of their policy choices." Id. at 21.
In 1994 CBS produced and broadcast a controversial seg
ment of "60 Minutes" entitled "The Ugly Face of Freedom,"
about modern Ukraine. The broadcast angered some viewers
who believed that many elements of the program had been
designed to give the impression that all Ukrainians harbor a
strongly negative attitude toward Jews. For example, inter
viewer Morley Safer suggested that Ukrainians were "genet
ically anti-Semitic" and "uneducated peasants, deeply super
stitious." Also, soundbites from an interview with the Chief
Rabbi of Lviv, Yaakov Bleich, gave viewers the impression
that he believes all Ukrainians are anti-Semites who want all
Jews to leave Ukraine. In addition, CBS overlaid the sound
of marching boots on a film clip of Ukrainian Boy Scouts
walking to church and introduced it in such a way as to give
viewers the impression that they were seeing "a neo-Nazi,
Hitler Youth-like movement." The narrator also stated that
the Ukrainian Galicia Division had helped in the roundup and
execution of Jews from Lviv in 1941, though this Division was
not in fact even formed until 1943 and therefore could not
possibly have participated in the deed. Perhaps most egre
giously, when Ukrainian speakers used the term "zhyd,"
which means simply "Jew," they were translated as having
said "kike," which is a derogatory term.
After the broadcast interviewees and members of the
Ukrainian-American community deluged CBS with letters.
In his letter Rabbi Bleich stated "unequivocally" that his
"words were quoted out of the context that they were said"
and that "the CBS broadcast was unbalanced" and "did not
convey the true state of affairs in Ukraine." Cardinal Luba
chivsky, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church,
who had also been interviewed, both sent a letter to CBS and
released a statement to the press. In the latter he stated,
"[M]y office was misled as to the actual thrust of the report.
Mr. Fager [the producer] presented the piece as one about
'post-communist Ukraine.' ... I can only deduce that the
goal of the report was to present all Western Ukrainians as
rabid anti-semites." Many other viewers pointed out histori
cal inaccuracies and offensive statements or characterizations