Crichton's depiction might in fact be accurate, at least in occasional instances.
      I wonder if you would not at long last care to break your silence and say a word
      either of retraction and apology, or if not that, then at least some word in defense
      of your broadcast and of your profession?
      Yours truly,
      Lubomyr Prytulak
      cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl,
      Mike Wallace.
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      Morley Safer Letter 5 9Apr99 Who blew the hands off Maksym Tsarenko?
      The sort of powerful story that neither you nor Rabbi Bleich were able to find is one of
      a Russian summer-camp councillor who had his hands blown off by Ukrainian
      nationalists for using the Russian language within Ukraine; or one of a Jewish
      summer-camp councillor having his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using
      Hebrew or Yiddish within Ukraine. Such things do not happen within Ukraine to either
      Russians or to Jews - they happen only to Ukrainians.
      April 9, 1999
      Morley Safer
      60 Minutes, CBS Television
      51 W 52nd Street
      New York, NY
      USA 10019
      Morley Safer:
      Who Blew The Hands Off
      Maksym Tsarenko?
      The photograph above shows Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma bestowing the Order of
      Yaroslaw the Wise on Maksym Tsarenko. My free translation of the text which explains
      the photograph is as follows:
      Among the first recipients of the Order, awarded on the fourth
      anniversary of the national independence of Ukraine, were leading
      Ukrainian workers in the fields of culture, art, and law: O.
      Basystiuk, A. Mokrenko, and F. Burchak.
      On this same day, the president of Ukraine also bestowed this mark
      of distinction, "for valor" upon twenty-year-old student at the
      Vynnytsia Pedagogical Institute, Maksym Tsarenko.
      During the summer holidays, Maksym was working as a councillor at a
      summer camp for young girls near Yevpatoria, Crimea.
      Haters of Ukraine, who rush to propose the view that Crimea is not a
      peninsula attached to Ukraine, but rather is an island unconnected
      to Ukraine, reacted with hostility to this summer camp, especially
      provoked by the Ukrainian language spoken by the Ukrainian children,
      which dared to resound even within Ukrainian Crimea. The hatred
      mounted to such an irrepressible degree that it provoked the bandits
      to the most egregious crime: they constructed an explosive and threw
      it into the window of the children's dormitory. Ten or so children
      could have been killed by the explosion. But the young Ukrainian
      councillor showed no confusion as to his duty. He picked up the
      bomb, shielding it with his own body, and jumped out of the
      building. Unfortunately, the bomb went off, seriously wounding
      Maksym.
      The best local surgeons fought for several days to save the boy's
      life. Thanks to them, the youth's life was spared. Unfortunately,
      it was not possible to save his hands.
      No one can accuse the recipient of not having earned his award.
      Ukrainian awards, in contrast to Soviet, are fully deserved.
      (Ukrainian-language newspaper, Novyi Shliakh (New Pathway) of
      7Oct95, based on the earlier report in Ukrains'ke Slovo, (Ukrainian
      Word), Kyiv, No. 37, 14Sep95)
      The above story of Maksym Tsarenko compels me to ask - not for the first time - who
      is in danger in Ukraine? The Western media urge us to accept that it is Jews and
      Russians who are in danger, threatened by Ukrainian nationalists. That, for example,
      is the conclusion of your infamous 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom of
      23Oct94. However, you came back from your brief visit to Ukraine with no data to
      substantiate such a claim. Almost a year ago, the Ukrainian Archive has requested
      both of you and of Rabbi Bleich the evidence backing your report of violence against
      Jews, and neither of you has as yet condescended to reply, strengthening the
      suspicion that your story was fabricated.
      The sort of powerful story that neither you nor Rabbi Bleich were able to find is one
      of a Russian summer-camp councillor who had his hands blown off by Ukrainian
      nationalists for using the Russian language within Ukraine; or one of a Jewish
      summer-camp councillor having his hands blown off by Ukrainian nationalists for using
      Hebrew or Yiddish within Ukraine. Such things do not happen within Ukraine to either
      Russians or to Jews - they happen only to Ukrainians. It is the story of Ukrainians
      being persecuted within Ukraine that you could have richly documented and broadcast
      to the world. The story of Maksym Tsarenko can be found multiplied many times over
      the torture-murders of Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Katelnytsky and his mother in
      their Kyiv apartment providing a recent example. The contrasting story of Jewish or
      Russian victimization within Ukraine is bogus - and yet that is the story that you
      unscrupulously chose to broadcast.
      Lubomyr Prytulak
      cc: Rabbi Bleich, Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney,
      Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace.
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      Morley Safer Letter 6 20Apr99 What kind of people run 60 Minutes?
      Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices described to Hertsgaard a sexually
      charged environment that had more in common with a drunken frat party than a
      professional newsroom. - Carol Lloyd
      The excerpt quoted in my letter to Morley Safer below is taken from a Carol Lloyd's A
      Feel For a Good Story of 17Mar98, published on the web site Mothers Who Think, whose
      home page can be accessed by clicking on the link immediately above, or on the logo
      immediately below:
      60 Minutes Executive Producer,
      Don Hewitt.
      But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's alleged behavior look
      like clumsy courtship. One woman described to Hertsgaard how
      Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there and forced his
      tongue down her throat. - Carol Lloyd
      April 20, 1999
      Morley Safer
      60 Minutes, CBS Television
      51 W 52nd Street
      New York, NY
      USA 10019
      Morley Safer:
      I call to your attention the following excerpt from Carol Lloyd's A Feel For a Good
      Story, published on the web site Mothers Who Think on 17Mar98. I will be asking you
      further below whether the information provided by Carol Lloyd might help explain your
      23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom:
      The irony is that Hewitt - the creator of the TV show famous for
      unveiling corruption and hypocrisy among the powerful - has been
      accused of worse deeds than any of the sexual charges leveled at
      Clinton.
      In 1991, reporter Mark Hertsgaard, author of "On Bended Knee: The
      Press and the Reagan Presidency," wrote an article for Rolling Stone
      magazine in which he documented Hewitt's own serious problems with
      impulse control. Women who worked in the "60 Minutes" offices
      described to Hertsgaard a sexually charged environment that had more
      in common with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom.
      Correspondent Mike Wallace was singled out for bottom slapping, lewd
      comments and unsnapping co-workers' bras.
      While today no one would hesitate to call such behavior sexual
      harassment, Wallace's cheerful willingness to do it in public - even
      in front of a stranger - made him seem like a good (albeit
      unpleasant) old boy. But the charges against Hewitt make Clinton's
      alleged behavior look like clumsy courtship. One woman described to
      Hertsgaard how Hewitt slammed her against a wall, pinned her there
      and forced his tongue down her throat. Hewitt vehemently denied the
      story and all other allegations to Hertsgaard, while Wallace
      admitted his own antics and promised they would never happen again.
      Rolling Stone eventually published Hertsgaard's article in a
      drastically reduced form, although Hertsgaard says Hewitt pulled all
      the strings he could to get the story killed. In an interview from
      his home in Takoma Park, Md., Hertsgaard spoke to Salon about the
      allegations of sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" that never made it
      into print - and about how the "men's club" within the media exposes
      other sexually reckless men, but still protects its own.
      Your story has some pretty explosive accusations against Don
      Hewitt. How did you come to write the piece?
      Sexual harassment was not the point of the investigation. I
      literally witnessed sexual harassment on my first day of interviews
      at "60 Minutes" and women began to tell me about it, so it gradually
      found its way into the story. But that wasn't the point, it just was
      so pervasive at the time that you couldn't miss it.
      What did you witness when you were there?
      The first day I was in the corridor talking with a female staffer
      and I saw out of the corner of my eye Mr. Wallace coming down the
      hall. He didn't know me yet because I hadn't interviewed him, so he
      had no idea that it was a reporter standing there. I'm sure it
      would have changed his mind. Anyway, just before he reached her she
      pushed both her hands behind her bottom, like a little kid trying to
      ward off a mama's spanking, and got up on her toes and leaned away.
      But that didn't stop him. As he went by, he swatted her on the butt
      with a rolled up magazine or newspaper or something like that.
      That's no big deal, one could say, but I must say it did raise my
      eyebrows. I said to her, "God, does that happen all the time?" and
      she said, "Are you kidding? That is nothing." And that led to
      people telling me how he'd also unsnap your bra strap or snap it for
      you. So he had a reputation for that.
      Then I also heard about this far-more-worrisome incident with Hewitt
      and that one did get into the piece, although in a much censored
      form, where he lunges at a woman in a deserted place, pins her
      against the wall and sticks his tongue in her mouth. There were
      other incidents women told me about Hewitt, and, of course, (former)
      Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn was already on the record in
      her book "We're Going to Make You a Star" accusing Hewitt of making
      an aggressive pass at her and sabotaging her work when she refused
      him.
      Was the sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" pervasive?
      It sure seemed that way. There's a woman quoted in my story saying
      that Mike would constantly have his hands on your thigh, or
      whatnot. One producer said that basically Mike Wallace and Don
      Hewitt felt this was their right. And that's how a lot of men in
      television felt for many years. Women were basically hired for
      their looks. You had to be competent too, but you damn well better
      look good.
      I understand that you had a difficult time getting the story
      published in Rolling Stone.
      The entire piece almost never ran because Don Hewitt tried to kill
      it and (Rolling Stone editor and publisher) Jann Wenner almost went
      along with him. They did emasculate the piece by taking out a lot
      of the damaging material. You'll see in there that there is one
      basic episode involving Don. There were four that I had reported.
      [...]
      So what did you think when you saw Hewitt taking a stand for
      Kathleen Willey?
      It was odd to me, seeing Don quoted in the New York Times on Friday
      and Saturday as he was hyping Sunday's broadcast. He's talking
      about what happened and I just thought of that old Dylan song:
      "You've got a lot of nerve."
      I hoped somebody would call him on it. In today's Times, Patricia
      Ireland, head of NOW, is quoted as saying if these charges by Ms.
      Willey are true, it has crossed a very important line from sexual
      harassment to sexual assault. And if that's the case, we have to be
      very serious about it. Well, the situation where Hewitt stuck his
      tongue down that women's throat - that's assault. That is assault.
      She certainly felt like she was assaulted. She freed herself by
      kicking him in the balls - which they also cut out. She runs away
      and then the next day, there was a fancy gala event where you have
      to come in evening dress and she's there and Hewitt, this son of a
      gun - he's like a randy old goat - he just could not take no for an
      answer. She was wearing a backless gown and suddenly she feels
      someone running his fingers up and down her bare back. She turns
      around, obviously jumpy from what had happened the day before, and
      sees the object of her horror - Hewitt - saying, "Don't be scared, I
      just think you're a very attractive girl." They cut that out of the
      article too.
      There's a lot of huffing and puffing within the media about
      Clinton's alleged behavior, with a lot of journalists complaining
      about the public's so-called apathy on the subject. But in the case
      of men like Hewitt, it seems pretty hypocritical.
      It's absolutely unmistakable - and Hewitt is an extremely good
      example - how most of the discourse about this issue involves people
      who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my
      hand. And that goes not just for Hewitt, but for many of these
      clowns both in the media here in Washington and in the Congress.
      Anybody who has spent any time around Capitol Hill knows that a
      large number of congressmen, both in the House and in the Senate,
      fool around with either their young staffers or the young female
      staffers of their colleagues. To any reporter who had their eyes
      open, this is not news.
      Carol Lloyd, A Feel For a Good Story, Mothers Who Think, 17Mar98.
      With respect to Carol Lloyd's statement above, I wonder if I could have your answers
      to just four questions:
      (1) Is 60 Minutes infected with a slackness of integrity? What Carol Lloyd appears to be
      describing in the upper echelons of the 60 Minutes administration - I am thinking
      particularly of executive producer Don Hewitt and co-editor Mike Wallace - is a
      deep-rooted slackness of integrity: the 60 Minutes environment has "more in common
      with a drunken frat party than a professional newsroom," the top 60 Minutes staff are
      "people who have no more moral standing than this ball-point pen in my hand," and
      executive producer Don Hewitt comports himself "like a randy old goat." Might it be
      the case, then, that the cause of your failing to satisfy minimal journalistic
      standards in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, and of your
      failing also in the years since that broadcast to retract any of its many errors, is
      that you yourself became infected by the same slackness of integrity that had already
      gripped other of the 60 Minutes leadership?
      (2) Does female hiring demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice program quality? If the
      top 60 Minutes staff require their female employees to be physically attractive and
      sexually accessible, then might the resulting inability of 60 Minutes to retain women
      of high professional quality have resulted in a degradation in the average competence
      of female employees? One may speak of demanding competence together with beauty, but
      what woman of high competence would have hesitated to find alternative employment
      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
      of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its
      poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must
      convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian
      that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were
      more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a
      moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this
      statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and
      that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it
      were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or
      unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm
      upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining
      your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.
      What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,
      concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a
      surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The
      discovery is that your name seems to be most closely connected to the conclusion that
      drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you
      proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The
      French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may
      constitute the pinnacle of your career.
      For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for
      "Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine
      Spectator web site. The article's headline announces that 60 Minutes Examines Stronger
      Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that
      the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in
      a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article
      viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal connection between
      (what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your
      own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast
      audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption
      shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:
      The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to
      people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What
      surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality
      rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.
      Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine
      drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was
      seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said
      John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the
      credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."
      After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the
      consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to
      dip.
      The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine
      consumption increases life expectancy:
      Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is
      linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about
      wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about
      wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said.
      Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other
      unnamed compounds in wine that contributed to higher levels of
      beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol.
      I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your
      French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I
      had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking
      was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a
      large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. 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.
      In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the
      amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well,
      as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of
      the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error which is to fail to
      grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration
      of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.
      The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine
      drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in
      experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the
      University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell
      largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.
      Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in
      The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research
      papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the
      research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim
      Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see
      that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.
      The French Paradox Research
      Cannot Have Been Experimental
      There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been
      gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been
      gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number
      of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly
      assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is
      that it guarantees that the subjects in each group are initially equivalent in every
      conceivable respect - equivalent in male-female ratio, in age, in health, in income, in
      diet, in smoking, in drug use, and so on. That is the magic of random assignment, and
      we cannot pause to discuss it - you will have to take my word for it.
      To groups that enjoy pre-treatment equality, the experimenter administers his treatment.
      After constituting his random groups, the experimenter would require the subjects in
      each group to drink different volumes of wine each day over many years - let us say over
      the course of 30 years. Subjects assigned to the zero-glass group would be required to
      drink no wine. Subjects assigned to the 1-glass group would be required to drink one
      glass of wine each day. Subjects assigned to the 2-glass group would be required to
      drink two glasses of wine each day. And so on up to, say, a 10-glass group, which given
      that we started with a zero-glass group gives us the 11 groups that I started out
      positing that we would need. As the experiment progressed, the number dying in each
      group as well as the cause of death, and the health of those still alive, would be
      monitored periodically.
      There are many ways in which this simplest of all experiments could be refined or
      elaborated, but we need not pause to discuss such complications here what I have
      outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all
      that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.
      Such an experiment has never been conducted
      And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an
      experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the
      literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.
      Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it
      because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to
      comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned
      them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass
      condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There
      is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would
      tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of
      their lives. The same at the other end of the scale - most people requested to drink
      large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had
      no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.