Страница:
ruin upon any who associated with him:
First character-revealing incident - how Kosinski attempted to elicit a declaration of love.
Meanwhile, matters had come to a crisis in the affair with Dora Militaru. He insisted that she profess her love for him, and when
she refused, he hit her repeatedly. Dora broke off the affair. Their relationship soon resumed as a friendship - in January he
would grant her his only TV interview, for Italian TV, undertaken within two years of the Village Voice episode - but his physical
assault ended their relationship as lovers.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 391)
Second character-revealing incident - how Kosinski had fun behind the wheel.
On the long straightaway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, he opened it up to 120, pure exhilaration for a boy who had been told
always to do things carefully, legally, and correctly. A little farther along they found themselves stuck on a two-lane road behind a
slow driver. As a man who would one day drive Formula One race cars, David was astonished at the fluidity and skill with which
Kosinski finally got around the recalcitrant ahead of him - and entertained mightily when Kosinski then slowed to a crawl and
used those skills to prevent the car from passing him. He was more than a little shocked, however, when Kosinski persisted with
the game in the face of an oncoming truck, causing the other car to run off into a ditch.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 150-151)
Third character-revealing incident - how Kosinski played a little joke on one of his students.
Kosinski looked at the young man severely. "You know, the very first time I saw you I got the feeling you were going to die
young," he said. "In the past twenty years I've had the same feeling about several people and each time I've had it, they died. Of
course, I could be wrong this time."
The young man, who was afraid of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, started to cry.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 287)
Fourth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski exposed Yale students to the intellectual contributions
of the Neo Charles Mansonists.
As part of the class, the Yale undergraduates were required to write about their own deaths. To stimulate their thinking, Kosinski
brought in members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement - a group of Satanists who arrived dressed in gray. They
saw themselves as having some sort of tenuous link with Charles Manson's Helter-Skelter family. Proselytizing in Kosinski's Yale
classroom, they urged the students to "accept and embrace evil within themselves." This notion was uncomfortably close to
Kosinski's own claim to Krystyna Iwaszkiewicz that he could achieve revenge upon his enemies because of a pact with the Devil
[...]. The classroom episode took an unexpected turn when a young Jewish student went off with the Satanists, prompting an
exchange with the student's parents over the pedagogical appropriateness of this classroom activity.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 300-301)
Fifth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski entertained his dining partners.
One day, when the three couples had planned to have dinner in the city, Rose Styron arrived first and was persuaded to be his
accomplice in a prank. Kosinski would hide in his apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, and the others would look for him. They
came, looked, failed to find, and began to grow cross; Sadri was ready for dinner, and didn't find the prank so funny. Kosinski
finally unfolded himself from behind the cabinets in his darkroom.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 262)
Sixth character-revealing incident - what Kosinski did to Marian Javits's dog - from which some might
conclude that Jerzy Kosinski was not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your
daughter, and not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your son - he was the kind of
man that you would not leave alone with your dog.
Marian Javits, in particular, was charmed by him, and she continued to be his friend even after his stories and eccentricities had
become familiar - this despite the fact that one of his eccentricities had to do with her dog. Lying in bed recovering from a leg
injury received while riding, she was startled when her dog ran furiously across the room, dripping urine. A moment later Kosinski
appeared at the door. Later a friend told her that Kosinski had been observed abusing the dog in a way that would engender such
behavior.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263)
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98
T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility
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 dramatic
moments were faked.
The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post
article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the
relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs:
Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug
smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who
cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities
which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their
crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident
principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC
television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity
of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing
Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news
sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same
as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity
that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making
public confession of their crimes.
Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes
broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable
incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their
crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed
to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies
lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do
not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom.
The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of
such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different.
In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a
fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the
ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and
that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly
Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again
that it advanced Israeli interests.
North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have
three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post
article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a
dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one
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
dramatic moments were faked.
[...]
When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule
had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach.
"Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said.
But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed
Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and
was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at
Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain.
[...]
The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed
guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a
high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to
travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous.
The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in
Colombia.
[...]
The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has
launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power
to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring
that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth."
CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on
the results of the British investigations [...].
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98
Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar
Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a
breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern
journalism.
The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive
because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on
the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate
them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust
fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph
of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast
over the CBS network on 23Oct94.
From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence
of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that
distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or
Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate.
The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests
otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are
rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval
eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less
of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the
powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,
but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the
viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is
widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented
throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but
rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is
largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to
truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.
Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some
sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in
lying.
The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,
September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in
navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the
original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new
understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other
record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian
Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon
Wiesenthal.
One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a
low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen
Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,
and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:
Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical
curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But
then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed
another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,
or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.
Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of
study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall
grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.
"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew
Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.
There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well
academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,
doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)
Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His
original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)
A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which
encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to
suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except
for the following brief statement:
Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland
Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of
Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic
programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes
little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)
The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and
cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:
At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were
melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add
the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New
Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political
Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason
and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the
ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and
sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of
with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling
Stone, and Harper's.
But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the
American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that
the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the
mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.
189)
The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and
punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of
his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying
success:
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's
capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic
to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories
- in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in
modern journalism. (p. 176)
Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had
seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at
Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.
This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his
income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New
Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the
attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal
but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)
There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds
that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that
he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his
perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:
Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the
celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington
magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true
stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of
the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was
laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at
nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no
last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and
the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a
department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in
the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down
was himself.
He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going
beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and
memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.
Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.
"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said
Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."
The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are
both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,
his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen
were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was
this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no
comment." (p. 182)
But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and
discredit:
Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of
Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship
of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the
second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of
Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the
history of modern journalism was unraveling.
No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of
Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot
rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the
young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that
Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the
daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle
ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted
kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the
lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
(p. 176)
The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its
editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined
pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period
between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of
George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's
conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual
proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would
be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics,
which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180)
Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an
image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.
However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public
into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.
Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior
could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and
palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:
For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated
audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because
of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup
materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact
checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he
presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written
with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that
never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake
mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if
they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He
apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than
mere truth offered. (p. 180)
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98
Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the
three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
FILM FRAUD
The liberation
that wasn't
A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
THE NEW REPUBLIC
NEW YORK
It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust
survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the
Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the
Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according
to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the
screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed
the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.
But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's
backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or
Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when
they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st
Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to
believe they were faking material.
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
'It's totally inaccurate.
The men couldn't have been
where they say they were
because the camp was 60
miles away from where we
were on the day of liberation'
Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
"You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
Company.
Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
either camp.
"It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
liberation."
Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
soldiers.
One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
says the survivor.
Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust
revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says
the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone
interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.
How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely
incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most
Jewish people think, I can't understand it."
She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what
kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first
place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.
People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says
it stands by the film's veracity.
The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems
all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among
other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of
Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and
its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.
The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on
the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own
Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president
Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an
achievement of the unit.
"It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not
compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the
761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat
performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it
blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."
Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,
which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The
unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its
liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof
of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never
contacted him to discuss the unit's history.
Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls
himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the
Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the
camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with
guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there
for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later."
The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is
gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
Committee.
Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior
and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost
of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth
Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the
Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying
for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools.
According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board
headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on
African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to
explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi
concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the
civil-rights movement."
The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews.
PR guru Howard Rubenstein, who is a vice-president of New York's Jewish
Community Relations Council (and who also flacks for radio station WLIB, known
for the anti-Semitic invective it regularly airs), worked pro bono on the
Apollo event and continues to plug the documentary, despite having heard that
it is misleading.
"I have no reason to distrust Nina [Rosenblum]," he says. "She seemed very
able and honest. I hope and pray it's accurate."
Peggy Tishman, a former president of the JCRC and a co-host of the evening
at the Apollo, is sticking by the documentary too. Ms. Tishman says the
documentary is "good for the Holocaust."
"Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud?" she
says. "What we're trying to do is make New York a better place for you and me
to live."
She claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is
important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a
lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This is not a truth that's
necessary."
Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.
The above Jeffrey Goldberg article was accompanied by two photographs, the
captions of which were:
U.S. soldiers, both high-ranking officers and
enlisted men, view a scene of horror at a death
camp. Concentration-camp prisoners were murdered
as a last act by departing German guards.
A black U.S. soldier guards German prisoners in
France during the last weeks of the war.
Comments on the above
Jeffrey Goldberg article
Where's the harm? The Liberators incident is relevant to several of the
topics discussed in the Ukrainian Archive. The Liberators has been somewhat
arbitrarily placed with 60 Minutes documents because it demonstrates the power
of the media to fabricate history. In the case of the 23 Oct 1994 60 Minutes
broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, the disinformation served to calumniate
Ukrainians; in the case of the PBS documentary, the Liberators, the
disinformation appears to be oriented toward improving relations between Jews
and blacks. Thus, whereas the 60 Minutes disinformation will readily be viewed
as destructive by all who learn of it, the Liberators disinformation may be
viewed by some as innocuous or even benevolent.
However, there are reasons for not viewing the Liberators disinformation
leniently or indulgently:
(1) Black grievances against Jews may be founded on genuine exploitation of
Blacks by Jews, and the Liberators may be an attempt to quiet opposition to
that exploitation and so allow it to continue.
(2) Setting the precedent of conniving at disinformation such as that offered
in the Liberators offers disseminators of disinformation the prospect of
impunity for manipulating public opinion to their own ends, and these ends vary
on the benevolence-malevolence continuum. Whereas inducing people who had
never been at Buchenwald to simulate returning to Buchenwald for PBS cameras
may seem harmless, the buildup of tolerance for such chicanery makes it easier
to similarly induce people to falsely testify in war crimes proceedings
concerning Holocaust events, with the result that the lives of innocent accused
are disrupted, shattered, and even lost.
"Capturing" and "liberating"? Referring to Allied forces "capturing" or
"liberating" the camps is inflating what really happened - which is that Allied
soldiers peacefully walked into camps that German forces had abandoned days
previously. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans'
organization, "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp."
In other words, the Liberators film leaves the impression of Jews attempting to
get black fighting units to falsely take credit for non-accomplishments.
Unreliability of eye-witness testimony. We have already had occasion to notice on
the Ukrainian Archive the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, as in the
cases of falsely accused Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk. The Liberators film
reminds us once again how easy it is to get some old men to say whatever you
want them to. Thus, we find that "two of the company's soldiers assert in the
film that they liberated Dachau," when we know that this could not have been
the case, and we find that "several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film
and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they
were liberated by blacks of these units," again when this is an impossibility.
Of course upon less biased questioning, some of these old men will recant: "But
Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on
the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they
were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers."
Responsible Jews and non-Jews oppose irresponsible Jews. It cannot escape
our attention that foremost among those challenging the disinformation in the
Liberators are the apparently-Jewish writer Jeffrey Goldberg, and
possibly-Jewish historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This
reinforces a point introduced earlier in the Ukrainian Archive during the
discussion of Warsaw's 1905 Alphonsenpogrom, to the effect that what may be
taken at first glance to be an expression of antagonism toward Jews may in
reality be an expression of opposition by responsible Jews and non-Jews alike
against irresponsible elements among Jews, and that it is the responsible Jews
themselves who may be in the vanguard of the attack against irresponsible Jews.
We have seen this to be the case repeatedly, not only during Warsaw's
Alphonsenpogrom, but in many prominent incidents - for example, Israeli defense
attorney Yoram Sheftel must be given a large share of the credit for exposing
the duplicity and incompetence of the Israeli justice system, and thereby
saving the life of John Demjanjuk, a case in which other Jews such as Phoenix
attorney William J. Wolf also played leading and heroic roles. The prominent
role played by responsible Jews in opposing irresponsible Jews should not be
surprising - the irresponsible Jews injure all Jews because their
irresponsibility attaches in popular thinking to Jews generally, and thus
serves to smear the good name of all Jews.
Important to note in the Liberators case, then, is that the friction does not
First character-revealing incident - how Kosinski attempted to elicit a declaration of love.
Meanwhile, matters had come to a crisis in the affair with Dora Militaru. He insisted that she profess her love for him, and when
she refused, he hit her repeatedly. Dora broke off the affair. Their relationship soon resumed as a friendship - in January he
would grant her his only TV interview, for Italian TV, undertaken within two years of the Village Voice episode - but his physical
assault ended their relationship as lovers.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 391)
Second character-revealing incident - how Kosinski had fun behind the wheel.
On the long straightaway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, he opened it up to 120, pure exhilaration for a boy who had been told
always to do things carefully, legally, and correctly. A little farther along they found themselves stuck on a two-lane road behind a
slow driver. As a man who would one day drive Formula One race cars, David was astonished at the fluidity and skill with which
Kosinski finally got around the recalcitrant ahead of him - and entertained mightily when Kosinski then slowed to a crawl and
used those skills to prevent the car from passing him. He was more than a little shocked, however, when Kosinski persisted with
the game in the face of an oncoming truck, causing the other car to run off into a ditch.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 150-151)
Third character-revealing incident - how Kosinski played a little joke on one of his students.
Kosinski looked at the young man severely. "You know, the very first time I saw you I got the feeling you were going to die
young," he said. "In the past twenty years I've had the same feeling about several people and each time I've had it, they died. Of
course, I could be wrong this time."
The young man, who was afraid of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, started to cry.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 287)
Fourth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski exposed Yale students to the intellectual contributions
of the Neo Charles Mansonists.
As part of the class, the Yale undergraduates were required to write about their own deaths. To stimulate their thinking, Kosinski
brought in members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement - a group of Satanists who arrived dressed in gray. They
saw themselves as having some sort of tenuous link with Charles Manson's Helter-Skelter family. Proselytizing in Kosinski's Yale
classroom, they urged the students to "accept and embrace evil within themselves." This notion was uncomfortably close to
Kosinski's own claim to Krystyna Iwaszkiewicz that he could achieve revenge upon his enemies because of a pact with the Devil
[...]. The classroom episode took an unexpected turn when a young Jewish student went off with the Satanists, prompting an
exchange with the student's parents over the pedagogical appropriateness of this classroom activity.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 300-301)
Fifth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski entertained his dining partners.
One day, when the three couples had planned to have dinner in the city, Rose Styron arrived first and was persuaded to be his
accomplice in a prank. Kosinski would hide in his apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, and the others would look for him. They
came, looked, failed to find, and began to grow cross; Sadri was ready for dinner, and didn't find the prank so funny. Kosinski
finally unfolded himself from behind the cabinets in his darkroom.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 262)
Sixth character-revealing incident - what Kosinski did to Marian Javits's dog - from which some might
conclude that Jerzy Kosinski was not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your
daughter, and not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your son - he was the kind of
man that you would not leave alone with your dog.
Marian Javits, in particular, was charmed by him, and she continued to be his friend even after his stories and eccentricities had
become familiar - this despite the fact that one of his eccentricities had to do with her dog. Lying in bed recovering from a leg
injury received while riding, she was startled when her dog ran furiously across the room, dripping urine. A moment later Kosinski
appeared at the door. Later a friend told her that Kosinski had been observed abusing the dog in a way that would engender such
behavior.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263)
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98
T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility
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 dramatic
moments were faked.
The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post
article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the
relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs:
Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug
smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who
cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities
which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their
crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident
principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC
television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity
of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing
Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news
sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same
as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity
that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making
public confession of their crimes.
Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes
broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable
incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their
crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed
to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies
lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do
not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom.
The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of
such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different.
In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a
fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the
ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and
that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly
Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again
that it advanced Israeli interests.
North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have
three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post
article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a
dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one
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
dramatic moments were faked.
[...]
When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule
had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach.
"Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said.
But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed
Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and
was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at
Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain.
[...]
The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed
guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a
high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to
travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous.
The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in
Colombia.
[...]
The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has
launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power
to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring
that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth."
CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on
the results of the British investigations [...].
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98
Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar
Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a
breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern
journalism.
The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive
because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on
the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate
them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust
fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph
of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast
over the CBS network on 23Oct94.
From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence
of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that
distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or
Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate.
The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests
otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are
rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval
eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less
of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the
powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,
but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the
viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is
widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented
throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but
rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is
largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to
truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.
Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some
sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in
lying.
The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,
September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in
navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the
original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new
understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other
record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian
Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon
Wiesenthal.
One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a
low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen
Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,
and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:
Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical
curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But
then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed
another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,
or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.
Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of
study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall
grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.
"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew
Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.
There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well
academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,
doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)
Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His
original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)
A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which
encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to
suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except
for the following brief statement:
Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland
Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of
Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic
programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes
little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)
The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and
cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:
At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were
melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add
the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New
Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political
Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason
and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the
ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and
sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of
with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling
Stone, and Harper's.
But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the
American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that
the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the
mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.
189)
The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and
punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of
his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying
success:
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's
capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic
to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories
- in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in
modern journalism. (p. 176)
Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had
seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at
Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.
This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his
income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New
Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the
attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal
but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)
There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds
that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that
he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his
perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:
Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the
celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington
magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true
stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of
the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was
laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at
nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no
last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and
the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a
department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in
the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down
was himself.
He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going
beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and
memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.
Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.
"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said
Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."
The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are
both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,
his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen
were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was
this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no
comment." (p. 182)
But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and
discredit:
Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of
Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship
of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the
second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of
Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the
history of modern journalism was unraveling.
No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of
Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot
rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the
young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that
Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the
daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle
ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted
kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the
lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
(p. 176)
The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its
editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined
pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period
between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of
George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's
conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual
proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would
be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics,
which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180)
Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an
image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.
However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public
into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.
Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior
could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and
palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:
For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated
audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because
of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup
materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact
checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he
presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written
with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that
never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake
mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if
they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He
apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than
mere truth offered. (p. 180)
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98
Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the
three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
FILM FRAUD
The liberation
that wasn't
A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
THE NEW REPUBLIC
NEW YORK
It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust
survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the
Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the
Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according
to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the
screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed
the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.
But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's
backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or
Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when
they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st
Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to
believe they were faking material.
Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
761st."
'It's totally inaccurate.
The men couldn't have been
where they say they were
because the camp was 60
miles away from where we
were on the day of liberation'
Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
"You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
Company.
Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
either camp.
"It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
liberation."
Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
soldiers.
One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
says the survivor.
Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust
revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says
the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone
interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.
How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely
incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most
Jewish people think, I can't understand it."
She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what
kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first
place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.
People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says
it stands by the film's veracity.
The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems
all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among
other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of
Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and
its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.
The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on
the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own
Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president
Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an
achievement of the unit.
"It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not
compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the
761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat
performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it
blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."
Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,
which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The
unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its
liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof
of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never
contacted him to discuss the unit's history.
Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls
himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the
Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the
camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with
guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there
for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later."
The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is
gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
Committee.
Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior
and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost
of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth
Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the
Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying
for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools.
According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board
headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on
African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to
explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi
concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the
civil-rights movement."
The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews.
PR guru Howard Rubenstein, who is a vice-president of New York's Jewish
Community Relations Council (and who also flacks for radio station WLIB, known
for the anti-Semitic invective it regularly airs), worked pro bono on the
Apollo event and continues to plug the documentary, despite having heard that
it is misleading.
"I have no reason to distrust Nina [Rosenblum]," he says. "She seemed very
able and honest. I hope and pray it's accurate."
Peggy Tishman, a former president of the JCRC and a co-host of the evening
at the Apollo, is sticking by the documentary too. Ms. Tishman says the
documentary is "good for the Holocaust."
"Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud?" she
says. "What we're trying to do is make New York a better place for you and me
to live."
She claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is
important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a
lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This is not a truth that's
necessary."
Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.
The above Jeffrey Goldberg article was accompanied by two photographs, the
captions of which were:
U.S. soldiers, both high-ranking officers and
enlisted men, view a scene of horror at a death
camp. Concentration-camp prisoners were murdered
as a last act by departing German guards.
A black U.S. soldier guards German prisoners in
France during the last weeks of the war.
Comments on the above
Jeffrey Goldberg article
Where's the harm? The Liberators incident is relevant to several of the
topics discussed in the Ukrainian Archive. The Liberators has been somewhat
arbitrarily placed with 60 Minutes documents because it demonstrates the power
of the media to fabricate history. In the case of the 23 Oct 1994 60 Minutes
broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, the disinformation served to calumniate
Ukrainians; in the case of the PBS documentary, the Liberators, the
disinformation appears to be oriented toward improving relations between Jews
and blacks. Thus, whereas the 60 Minutes disinformation will readily be viewed
as destructive by all who learn of it, the Liberators disinformation may be
viewed by some as innocuous or even benevolent.
However, there are reasons for not viewing the Liberators disinformation
leniently or indulgently:
(1) Black grievances against Jews may be founded on genuine exploitation of
Blacks by Jews, and the Liberators may be an attempt to quiet opposition to
that exploitation and so allow it to continue.
(2) Setting the precedent of conniving at disinformation such as that offered
in the Liberators offers disseminators of disinformation the prospect of
impunity for manipulating public opinion to their own ends, and these ends vary
on the benevolence-malevolence continuum. Whereas inducing people who had
never been at Buchenwald to simulate returning to Buchenwald for PBS cameras
may seem harmless, the buildup of tolerance for such chicanery makes it easier
to similarly induce people to falsely testify in war crimes proceedings
concerning Holocaust events, with the result that the lives of innocent accused
are disrupted, shattered, and even lost.
"Capturing" and "liberating"? Referring to Allied forces "capturing" or
"liberating" the camps is inflating what really happened - which is that Allied
soldiers peacefully walked into camps that German forces had abandoned days
previously. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans'
organization, "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp."
In other words, the Liberators film leaves the impression of Jews attempting to
get black fighting units to falsely take credit for non-accomplishments.
Unreliability of eye-witness testimony. We have already had occasion to notice on
the Ukrainian Archive the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, as in the
cases of falsely accused Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk. The Liberators film
reminds us once again how easy it is to get some old men to say whatever you
want them to. Thus, we find that "two of the company's soldiers assert in the
film that they liberated Dachau," when we know that this could not have been
the case, and we find that "several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film
and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they
were liberated by blacks of these units," again when this is an impossibility.
Of course upon less biased questioning, some of these old men will recant: "But
Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on
the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they
were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers."
Responsible Jews and non-Jews oppose irresponsible Jews. It cannot escape
our attention that foremost among those challenging the disinformation in the
Liberators are the apparently-Jewish writer Jeffrey Goldberg, and
possibly-Jewish historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This
reinforces a point introduced earlier in the Ukrainian Archive during the
discussion of Warsaw's 1905 Alphonsenpogrom, to the effect that what may be
taken at first glance to be an expression of antagonism toward Jews may in
reality be an expression of opposition by responsible Jews and non-Jews alike
against irresponsible elements among Jews, and that it is the responsible Jews
themselves who may be in the vanguard of the attack against irresponsible Jews.
We have seen this to be the case repeatedly, not only during Warsaw's
Alphonsenpogrom, but in many prominent incidents - for example, Israeli defense
attorney Yoram Sheftel must be given a large share of the credit for exposing
the duplicity and incompetence of the Israeli justice system, and thereby
saving the life of John Demjanjuk, a case in which other Jews such as Phoenix
attorney William J. Wolf also played leading and heroic roles. The prominent
role played by responsible Jews in opposing irresponsible Jews should not be
surprising - the irresponsible Jews injure all Jews because their
irresponsibility attaches in popular thinking to Jews generally, and thus
serves to smear the good name of all Jews.
Important to note in the Liberators case, then, is that the friction does not