n, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have escaped there. Maybe they had gotten there by boat. The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war, Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed. How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin, but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better. What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or in life, was whatever worked best. Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories had become an important part of his personal capital. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172) And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son, Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German translation of The Painted Bird: But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis, but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink. As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225) In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological: There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure." Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130) Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail. Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski): Toward the end of the meal he suggested that the two of them go to Chateau Nineteen, an S-M parlor with which he seemed to be quite familiar. She agreed on condition that she not be required to participate or remove her clothes. Once they were there, he moved comfortably among the patrons, chatting as if at a country-club tea. He was particularly friendly with a man who worked in the jewelry district, who was busy masturbating as they spoke. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 360-361) An accumulation of incidents points to the conclusion that Jerzy Kosinski was irresponsible, immature, impulsive, physically abusive toward women, and generally reckless with the welfare of others. Below are six character-revealing incidents which taken collectively might have long ago led Jews to write Jerzy Kosinski off as unfit for leadership, might have long ago led Jews to conclude that he was too unstable to be trusted as a Holocaust witness, might have long ago led Jews to conclude that he should be shunned as someone likely to bring 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 peop