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