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