[WUSA]"--and second that it will sanction only a misrepre
      sentation made directly to the Commission or intended to be
      passed on to the Commission.
      The Commission reasonably found Serafyn had not alleged
      that CBS intended to make any representation either directly
      or indirectly "to the Commission." Assuming for the sake of
      the argument that CBS could be sanctioned for making a
      misrepresentation through WUSA, we agree with the Com
      mission that Serafyn did not substantiate his claim that CBS
      knew about the complaint pending before the agency when it
      made the two misrepresentations to WUSA. Serafyn's only
      evidence is that the UACN had sent CBS's counsel a copy of
      the complaint, but that was after WUSA had received the
      misinformation and relayed it to the Commission. Absent
      any allegation that CBS knew that the first two versions of
      the incident it provided to WUSA would make their way to
      the Commission, the agency reasonably decided not to sanc
      tion CBS for misrepresentation.
      CONTENTS:
      Title Page
      I. Background
      II. News Distortion
      A. Evidentiary standard
      B. Licensee's policy on distortion
      C. Nature of particular evidence
      1. Extrinsic evidence
      (a) Outtakes of the interview with Rabbi Bleich
      (b) The viewer letters
      (c) The refusal to consult Professor Luciuk
      2. Evidence of factual inaccuracies
      D. Misrepresentation
      III. Conclusion
      III. Conclusion
      The Commission acted arbitrarily and capriciously in deny
      ing Serafyn's petition without analyzing more precisely the
      evidence he presented. On the other hand, the Commission
      reasonably held that CBS did not make a misrepresentation
      to the Commission. We therefore vacate and remand the
      Commission's decision in WGPR and affirm its decision in
      Stockholders of CBS Inc.
      So ordered.
      HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 738 hits since 12Aug98
      Jeannine Aversa Associated Press 12Aug98 FCC must review 60 Minutes Segment
      Serafyn had asked the FCC to turn down CBS' license request for
      WGPR-TV in Detroit - now WWJ-TV - arguing that the network was not
      fit to receive the license because it had aired a distorted news program.
      The Associated Press article below provides a brief introduction to the
      full United States Court of Appeals decision which is available on the
      Ukrainian Archive. The original of the Associated Press article was
      provided by Yahoo, more specifically at Jeannine Aversa.
      Wednesday August 12 2:58 AM EDT
      FCC To Look at '60 Minutes' Segment
      JEANNINE AVERSA Associated Press Writer
      WASHINGTON (AP) - Responding to a federal appeals court decision,
      government TV regulators will take a new look at whether CBS' "60
      Minutes" intentionally distorted the news in a 1994 segment on the
      Ukraine.
      A Federal Communications Commission ruling against CBS on the matter
      could call into question the network's fitness to hold all or some of its
      broadcast licenses, said attorneys for the agency and for Alexander
      Serafyn, who led the court case against the "60 Minutes" report.
      But CBS attorneys, speaking on condition of anonymity, disagreed. They
      said only WWJ-TV in Detroit - the station involved in the present
      challenge - could be affected.
      On Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
      concluded that the FCC didn't sufficiently explain why it decided not to
      hold a hearing on the allegations involving the "60 Minutes" segment.
      Given the court's ruling, the commission will re-examine the entire
      record, including Serafyn's allegations that the segment was
      intentionally distorted, an FCC attorney said.
      Serafyn had asked the FCC to turn down CBS' license request for WGPR-TV
      in Detroit - now WWJ-TV - arguing that the network was not fit to receive
      the license because it had aired a distorted news program.
      Serafyn, an American of Ukrainian ancestry who is retired and living in
      Detroit, had submitted evidence to the FCC involving his allegation about
      the broadcast, entitled, "The Ugly Face of Freedom." The FCC denied
      Serafyn's petition for a hearing, saying it would not investigate an
      allegation of news distortion without "substantial extrinsic evidence."
      The court said the FCC misapplied its standard for holding a hearing
      because it required Serafyn to demonstrate that CBS intended to distort
      the news rather than merely requiring that he "raise a substantial and
      material question of fact" - a less demanding test.
      CBS attorneys asserted there was no evidence the network intentionally
      distorted the segment. In addition, they said the FCC has never revoked
      a broadcast license on such grounds.
      The broadcast angered some viewers who believed that parts had been
      designed to give the impression that all Ukrainians harbor a strongly
      negative attitude toward Jews, the court said.
      "This is basically an effort on the part of the Ukrainian community,"
      said Arthur Belendiuk, Serafyn's attorney. "The case is not so much
      about Mr. Serafyn as it is about a community that felt horribly maligned
      by what was said."
      After the FCC revisits the case, the commission has several options: It
      could issue a new order that basically upholds its 1995 order but
      provides more details on how the decision was reached; it could order a
      hearing on the matter; or it could ask interested parties to comment and
      then it could issue a new order, the FCC attorney said.
      Whatever the commission ultimately decides is likely to be appealed by
      the losing party, Belendiuk and other attorneys said.
      HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1156 hits since 12May98
      Rabbi David H. Lincoln Ukrainian Weekly 30October94 A New York rabbi's response
      Rabbi David H. Lincoln of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York was among the first to object to the 60 Minutes
      broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom of 23Oct94. Rabbi Lincoln has had a longstanding interest in Ukraine, inherited
      from his father, as is explained in the discussion of The Ukrainian Question in 1935.
      Everything below is from the Ukrainian Weekly.
      A New York rabbi's response
      Following is the text of a letter sent on October 25 to the CBS program "60 Minutes" by Rabbi David H. Lincoln of
      the Park Avenue Synagogue. The letter is reprinted here with the permission of Rabbi Lincoln, who last year traveled
      to western Ukraine.
      Park Avenue Synagogue
      50 East 87 Street
      New York, N.Y. 10125
      Mr. Jeffrey Fager, Producer
      CBS "60 Minutes"
      524 West 57th Street
      New York, NY 10019
      Dear Sir:
      I feel that your program on Lviv and Ukrainians was most unfair.
      To show boy scouts and say they are Nazis marching, to translate "Zhyd" as kike (in western Ukraine Zhyd is the
      word for Jew), to infer that the word for nation - "natsiya" - might mean Nazi etc., etc. - is most upsetting to many
      of us who know today's Ukraine.
      It really is time for us to enjoy the resurgence of Jewish life in Ukraine after the horrors of the German
      occupation and communism, and to appreciate the heroic efforts of the Ukrainian people and government to assist the
      Jewish community in all their endeavors.
      The history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations often tragic is a complicated one, but you would have done well to have
      informed the public of the better aspects of those contacts. For instance, Ukraine was the sole independent nation
      that had complete Jewish national autonomy (1917) and had Yiddish-speaking ministers in the government representing
      the rights of minorities.
      Today, when Russian Jews send their children to Ukraine for safe keeping in times of danger, no good can come
      from distortions such as those portrayed in your program.
      Yours faithfully,
      Rabbi David H. Lincoln
      HOME DISINFORMATION POLAND 8359 hits since 04-Feb-1998
      Jerzy Kosinski: Grand Calumniator of Poland
      Jerzy Kosinski
      who the world understood to have been To Hell and Back
      The Audie Murphy of the Holocaust
      turned out to be little better than the
      Grand Calumniator of Poland
      Holocaust Witness Jerzy Kosinski
      Jerzy Kosinski was once to Poland what Simon Wiesenthal is today to Ukraine. Jerzy Kosinski was the grand calumniator of Poland;
      Simon Wiesenthal is the grand calumniator of Ukraine. The Poles have been successful in discrediting their grand calumniator; the Ukrainians
      are too timid to attempt to discredit Simon Wiesenthal. The present web page is dedicated to understanding Jerzy Kosinski, to
      congratulating the Poles, and to giving courage to Ukrainians.
      Who was Jerzy Kosinski? Jerzy Kosinski was born Jerzy Lewinkopf to Mojzesz (Moses) Lewinkopf and Elzbieta Lewinkopf (maiden name
      Elzbieta Wanda Weinreich). Six significant dates in Jerzy Kosinski's life were:
      1933 born in Lodz, Poland
      1959 entered USA on a student visa
      1960 published The Future is Ours, Comrade, under pseudonym Joseph Novak
      1968 won the National Book Award for The Painted Bird
      1982 veracity challenged in Village Voice article, "Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words"
      1991 committed suicide
      Biographer James Park Sloan
      I quote from two sources by the same author. I quote below from two sources, both written by James Park Sloan: (1) the magazine
      article, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994; and (2) the book, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996. The
      first source provides the first two excerpts below, in blue, which by themselves present the chief features of the Kosinski story. The reader
      interested only in a broad outline need not read beyond these first two quotations. The second source provides a number of further
      excerpts shown in green, which serve to flesh in a fuller picture. The analogy to Audie Murphy in the above title was taken from p. 227 of
      this second source. Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WW II who went on to become a movie star, and played
      himself in the autobiographical war film, To Hell and Back.
      Who is James Park Sloan? The dust jacket of the Sloan book informs us of the following:
      JAMES PARK SLOAN is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a prize-winning
      novelist, and a widely published short story writer and critic. He knew Jerzy Kosinski for over twenty years
      before Kosinski's death.
      A Personal Experience
      I recollect, by the way, many years ago talking to a New York Jewish lawyer about Kosinski's book The Painted Bird, partly on the basis of
      which this lawyer held the deep conviction that Poles were pretty close to sub-human. When he told me about Kosinski's description of
      eyeballs being torn out as an incident that would not be clearly out of place in a Polish household, I replied - to his discomfort - that such
      a scene would be about as typical in a Polish household as it would be in an American one. When I added that the only Poles that I had ever
      known were intelligent, civilized, and cultured he did not reply, but his manner suggested that I had told him something that was a patent
      impossibility.
      What's the Relevance?
      Why is so much attention given to Jerzy Kosinski below, even to the point of touching on his sexual deviance and other character defects?
      As already mentioned above, Kosinski provides a precedent of a calumniator of a Slavic peoples who has been successfully and thoroughly
      discredited, and whose example thus may give Ukrainians courage to similarly discredit their many calumniators, chief among whom is Simon
      Wiesenthal. Beyond that, however, the Kosinski biography provides unusually detailed information which brings to the fore several
      generalizations which may assist in the understanding of the phenomenon of anti-Ukrainian calumny.
      The Gang of Ten
      Let us begin. Heading the list of anti-Ukrainian calumniators are the following nine: Yitzhak Arad, Dov Ben-Meir, Yaakov Bleich, Alan
      Dershowitz, Sol Littman, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal. If we expand this list to include prominent calumniators
      of Slavs, Jerzy Kosinski makes it a list of ten. In order to express my disapproval of these individuals, and in order to encourage in Slavs in
      general, and in Ukrainians in particular, an attitude of bold intolerance toward their misdeeds, I propose that they be called "the gang of ten,"
      as I myself do below.
      Incidentally, the link to Sol Littman above will take the reader to the very section in "The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes" that deals with Littman,
      but only when using a Netscape browser - readers relying on other browsers will have to use CTRL+F to get down to the section titled "Sol
      Littman's Mengele Scare."
      Examining the gang of ten, it is possible to arrive at several generalizations, the chief of which may be the following:
      (1) The gang of ten is Jewish. One notices immediately that all ten of these calumniators of the Slavs are Jewish. This
      observation reminds us that in examining those who were responsible for the 23Oct94 60 Minutes story, The Ugly Face of Freedom, seven
      out of seven of those in the chain of command proved to be Jews (three being common to both lists).
      But are there any non-Jewish calumniators? Of course there are, and where I find them, I impartially include them on the Ukrainian Archive.
      Trouble is, I don't find many, and their calumniation does not rank as high. One of these is University of Toronto historian Robert Magocsi,
      and another is Harvard University historian Omeljan Pritsak. Offhand, I can't think of any others. But while Magocsi and Pritsak distort, they
      cannot compare with any of the gang of ten (or with any of the CBS gang of seven). The really egregious calumniation comes only from
      Jews.
      Henryk Sienkiewicz. Henryk Sienkiewicz (among my favorite novelists for his Quo Vadis) comes to mind as a Polish calumniator of Ukraine
      (in his novel about Bohdan Khmelnytsky, With Fire and Sword), but he is not discussed on the Ukrainian Archive primarily because he is not
      contemporary, and also because, like Magocsi and Pritsak, he is more subtle. The Ukrainian Archive restricts attention to contemporaries
      whose calumniation is egregious.
      The Ukrainian archive does not focus on Jews. It has been more than once remarked that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on Jews, which
      is incorrect - which is no more than an additional calumniation of Ukrainians. The truth is that the Ukrainian Archive focuses on
      calumniators, and it incidentally happens that the chief of these are Jews. If the leading calumniators of Ukraine had proven to be Czechs or
      Poles or Romanians or Hungarians or Russians or Germans or Armenians or Iranians or Palestinians or Chinese or whatever, I would have
      impartially and disinterestedly featured them instead of Jews. If someone can bring to my attention prominent contemporary non-Jewish
      calumniators of Ukraine that I have been overlooking, I will gladly give them generous representation on the Ukrainian Archive, and if such
      non-Jewish calumniators overwhelm the Jewish calumniators by their numbers, then all the better. The prominence of Jews on the Ukrainian
      Archive is not to be explained by looking into my psyche, it is to be explained by examining the characteristics of calumniators of Ukraine. It
      is not for me to justify why Jews appear so frequently on the pages of the Ukrainian Archive, it is for Jews to explain why no Gentiles can be
      found whose anti-Slavic calumnies are able to compete with those of the Jews in the gang of ten (or with those of the Jews in the CBS gang
      of seven).
      (2) The gang of ten is prominent. One notices too that these are not ten obscure Jews, but highly placed ones. Their
      names are recognizable. They constitute a Jewish leadership. They hold high office within the Jewish community, or within society
      generally. Two have been spoken of as candidates for Nobel prizes. They frequently appear on television or are quoted in the media or are
      cited in the discussion of Jewish affairs. Perhaps the only other Jews who equal or exceed them in prominence fall into three categories: (i)
      Jews functioning in a non-Jewish capacity, as for example musicians and scientists; (ii) North American Jewish politicians, particularly
      Congressmen, Senators, or Mayors in the United States, but again functioning only in small part as Jewish representatives; and (iii) Israeli
      politicians and military leaders. However, restricting our attention to Jews who live in, or who are influential in, North America, and to those
      who appear expressly as representatives of Jewish interests, the gang of ten constitutes a dominant clan. They set the agenda for
      Jewish-Slavic dialogue. Even the one who lives in Austria (Simon Wiesenthal), and the two who live in Israel (Yitzhak Arad and Dov
      Ben-Meir), are able to make their presence felt in North America either during their visits, or in being covered by the media, or by means of
      their court room testimony either in Israel or in North America. American Jews such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are also highly
      prominent, and do speak on Jewish affairs, but speak primarily of the State of Israel, and - unfortunately - have little to say about the
      Slavic world. Overwhelmingly, the Jews who step forward to speak on the Slavs do so only to calumniate. Whereas individual Jews have
      occasionally stepped forward to defend Ukrainians, I know of none who does so on an ongoing basis the way that the gang of ten defames
      Ukrainians on an ongoing basis.
      Raul Hilberg. Jewish historian Raul Hilberg deserves mention as falling in a class by himself. I do not agree with everything he says, but in
      cases where I disagree, I do not regard Hilberg as guilty of calumny, but only as falling within the range of responsible but divergent opinion
      which is to be expected upon any historical question. Raul Hilberg has amply demonstrated that he is ready to be guided by the evidence to
      conclusions without regard to whether they are palatable to Jews or Germans or Ukrainians or other involved parties.
      (3) The gang of ten is typified by deception. I understand calumniation to mean damaging utterances characterized
      by untruth. An utterance that is true, I do not characterize as calumny no matter how damaging. To not mince words, then, the gang of
      ten is a pack of liars. The most fantastic, the most childish, the most palpably untrue statements spew from their lips in profusion, as is
      amply documented on the Ukrainian Archive. They suppress evidence, they create historical events out of thin air, they contradict
      themselves from one recitation to the next.
      (4) The gang of ten enjoys impunity for lying. When the deceptions of any of these calumniators are brought to
      their attention, or to public attention, the refutations are ignored. The ten calumniators appear to be able to say whatever untruths they
      want with little fear of punishment or censure or even embarrassment. They rarely have to correct their misstatements, or to retract them,
      or to apologize for them. Of the ten, only Jerzy Kosinski has lost his impunity, but he did nevertheless enjoy a large measure of impunity over
      many years of his professional calumniation. The generalization, therefore, is not that the gang of ten enjoy absolute and permanent
      impunity, but only that they enjoy surprising measures of impunity over surprising intervals of time.
      (5) The gang of ten is typified by modest intellectual capacity. On the whole, the members of the gang of
      ten have the minds of children. This is demonstrated primarily in their lying which is primitive and palpable, and which is not merely
      occasional, but which permeates their thinking. On top of that, their speech and their writing tends to be illogical to the point of
      incoherence. They are strangers to the ideal of being constrained by logic. They don't know the facts, and they don't rely on facts. In not
      a single case have I come across anything any of them might have said or written touching on Ukrainian-Jewish relations that one would be
      forced to admire - or so much as respect - for its reasoning or its data or its expression. Given their prominence and their power, their
      academic and intellectual accomplishments, on the whole, are unimpressive. The bulk of their writing would get C's or worse if submitted in
      freshman courses in history or political science or journalism. The only one of the ten to achieve an unambiguous distinction outside his
      calumniation activities is Alan Dershowitz - Harvard law professor, media star, defender of O. J. Simpson. He alone among the ten must be
      acknowledged to have substantial academic qualifications and to show flashes of intelligence and wit. However, restricting myself to his
      statements on Ukrainians or Palestinians, I find Dershowitz's thinking fully as primitive and as childishly self-serving and as duplicitous as that
      of the other nine.
      The incongruity between low desert and high reward is particularly great in the case of Jerzy Kosinski; the evidence below will demonstrate
      that in addition to lacking academic capacity, and in addition to lacking literary skills, every area of his life was crippled by immaturity,
      irresponsibility, deception, and perversion.
      What picture emerges?
      Is there any way of tying all of the above generalizations into a single coherent picture? Why should it be the case that the leading
      slanderers of Ukrainians are all Jewish? How can it be that Jewish leaders are so prone to lying, and have such palpable intellectual
      shortcomings, and sometimes even remarkable character defects? How does it come to pass that they are permitted to incite hatred against
      Ukrainians with impunity? The answers to these questions can be found throughout the Ukrainian Archive.
      An individual Pole is persecuted by Simon Wiesenthal
      Jerzy Kosinski calumniated the Polish people collectively. Simon Wiesenthal persecuted a single Pole - Frank Walus - individually.
      Time For the Quotes
      And now for the quotations from Sloan's article:
      Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" was celebrated for its "overpowering
      authenticity":
      "Jerzy was a fantastic liar," said Agnieszka Osiecka, Poland's leading pop lyricist and a familiar figure in Polish intellectual
      circles.... If you told Jerzy you had a Romanian grandmother, he would come back that he had fifteen cousins all more Romanian
      than your grandmother ... and they played in a Gypsy band!"
      Osiecka was responding to a recent expose by the Polish journalist Joanna Siedlecka, in which she argued that Jerzy Kosinski,
      Poland's best-known Holocaust survivor, had profoundly falsified his wartime experiences. According to Siedlecka, Kosinski
      spent the war years in relatively gentle, if hardly idyllic, circumstances and was never significantly mistreated. She thus
      contradicts the sanctioned version of his life under the German occupation, which has generally been assumed to be only thinly
      disguised in his classic first novel, "The Painted Bird," published in this country by Houghton Mifflin in 1965. ...
      In stark, uninflected prose, "The Painted Bird" describes the disasters that befall a six-year-old boy who is separated from his
      parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
      demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of his
      wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A farmer
      forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the book, the boy
      drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and is flung by the angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit,
      he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. ...
      "Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant account transcends confession," Elie Wiesel wrote in the Times Book
      Review. At the time of Kosinski's suicide, in 1991, Wiesel said, "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography
      I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."
      Wiesel's review sanctified the work as a valid testament of the Holocaust, more horrible, more revealing - in a sense, truer
      than the literature that came out of the camps. Other writers and critics agreed. Harry Overstreet wrote that "The Painted Bird"
      would "stand by the side of Anne Frank's unforgettable 'Diary'" as "a powerfully poignant human document," while Peter Prescott,
      also comparing it to Anne Frank's "Diary," called the book "a testament not only to the atrocities of the war, but to the failings of
      human nature." The novelist James Leo Herlihy saluted it as "brilliant testimony to mankind's survival power."
      "Account," "confession," "testament," "document," "testimony": these were the key words in the book's critical reception. What
      made "The Painted Bird" such an important book was its overpowering authenticity. Perhaps it wasn't exactly a diary
      six-year-olds don't keep diaries - but it was the next best thing. And in one respect it was better: Kosinski was Anne Frank as a
      survivor, walking among us.
      "The Painted Bird" was translated into almost every major language and many obscure ones. It was a best-seller in Germany
      and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. It became the cornerstone or reading lists in university courses on the
      Holocaust, where it was often treated as a historical document, and, as a result, it has been for a generation the source of what
      many people "know" about Poland under the German occupation. At the height of Kosinski's reputation, there were those who
      said that somewhere down the road Kosinski was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.
      (Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 46-47)
      But turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth:
      According to Joanna Siedlecka ..., Kosinski's wrenching accounts of his wartime experiences were fabricated from whole cloth.
      ... Siedlecka contends that Kosinski spent the war with his family his mother, father, and later, an adopted brother - and that
      they lived in relative security and comfort.
      The Kosinskis survived, she suggests, in part because Jerzy Kosinski's father, whose original name was Moses Lewinkopf, saw
      bad times coming and acquired false papers in the common Gentile name of Kosinski; in part because they had money ... and
      were able to pay for protection with cash and jewelry; and in part because a network of Polish Catholics, at great risk to
      themselves, helped hide them.
      Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have
      collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the N.K.V.D., after the liberation of Dabrowa by
      the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her
      real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire
      Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski
      spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa - goods unavailable to the neighbors' children - in the safety of his
      house and yard....
      (Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, p. 48)
      Right from the start, Kosinski wrote under duress - an impecunious young man,
      particularly situated to be of use to clandestine forces, he could leapfrog to
      advancement only by cooperating with these forces. Thus, his first book, the
      Future is Ours, Comrade (1960), was published under the pseudonym Joseph
      Novak, and appears to have been sponsored by the CIA:
      Czartoryski recommends Kosinski to the CIA.
      Between Kosinski's penchant for telling more than the truth and the CIA's adamant insistence on telling as little as possible, the
      specific financial arrangements concerning the "book on Russia" may never be made public. Indeed, full documentation probably
      does not exist. A number of facts, however, argue strongly that there was CIA/USIA intermediation on behalf of the book, with or