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depth, giving superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on,

discussing questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing

damage because your conclusions proved to be false.

April 21, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I find your photograph. Recently, I was searching the internet looking for a photograph

of you that I could use on the Ukrainian Archive (UKAR), and I did manage to find an

attractive one, and I did put it on UKAR, as you can see at:

http://www.ukar.org/safer.shtml

I attach to it a caption. Underneath this photograph I selected from the many

ill-considered things that you said in your 23Oct94 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face

of Freedom, your statement "Western Ukraine also has a long, dark history of blaming its

poverty, its troubles, on others." A moment's reflection upon this statement must

convince any objective observer that it is unlikely to be the case that some historian

that you consulted had recommended to you the conclusion that Western Ukrainians were

more predisposed than other people to blaming their troubles on others. Rather, a

moment's reflection must convince any objective observer that it is likely that this

statement came off the top of your head without the least evidence to support it, and

that you then had the temerity to pass it along to tens of millions of viewers as if it

were a fact. In making this statement, and in making the scores of other erroneous or

unsupported statements that you also made on that broadcast, you were inflicting harm

upon Ukraine, you were lowering the credibility of 60 Minutes, and you were undermining

your standing as a journalist of competence and integrity.

What you are most famous for. The reason that I am writing to you today, however,

concerns The Ugly Face of Freedom only indirectly. What concerns me today is a

surprising discovery that I made while searching for your name on the Internet. The

discovery is that your name seems to be most closely co

drinking three to five glasses of wine per day increases longevity, which conclusion you

proposed on a 60 Minutes story broadcast on 5Nov95, apparently under the title The

French Paradox. It seems that you have become famous for this story, and that it may

constitute the pi

For example, a representative Internet article that is found upon an InfoSeek search for

"Morley Safer, 60 Minutes" is written by Kim Marcus and appears on the Home Wine

Spectator web site. The article's headline a

Evidence Linking Wine and Good Health, with the comparative "stronger" signifying that

the evidence presented in the 5Nov95 broadcast was better than the evidence presented in

a similar 60 Minutes broadcast four years earlier. This Home Wine Spectator article

viewed your broadcast as demonstrating the existence of a causal co

(what some might judge a high volume of) wine consumption and longevity, underlined your

own high credibility and the high authority of your sources, pointed out the vast

audience to which your conclusions had been beamed, and suggested that wine consumption

shot up as a result of at least the first French Paradox broadcast:

The study also found that the benefits of wine drinking extended to

people who drank from three to five glasses of wine per day. "What

surprised us most was that wine intake signified much lower mortality

rates," Safer said to the television show's audience.

Overall, the segment should prove a big boost to the argument that wine

drinking in moderation can be a boon to one's health. The segment was

seen by more than 20 million people. "It isn't just information," said

John De Luca, president of California's Wine Institute, "it's the

credibility that comes with Morley Safer interviewing the scientists."

After the first French Paradox episode aired in November 1991 the

consumption of red wine shot up in the United States, and it has yet to

dip.

The Kim Marcus article underlined your failure to question the conclusion that wine

consumption increases life expectancy:

Throughout the episode, Safer didn't challenge the fact that wine is

linked to longer life; rather, he was interested in what it was about

wine that made it unique. "The central question is what is it about

wine, especially red wine, that promotes coronary health," he said.

Safer came to the conclusion that it is not only alcohol but other

u

beneficial high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol.

I had already seen that French Paradox broadcast. As a matter of fact, I had watched your

French Paradox story when it was first broadcast on 5Nov95, and even while watching it I

had immediately recognized that your conclusion attributing longer life to wine drinking

was unjustified, and that you were causing harm in passing this conclusion along to a

large audience almost all of whom would accept it as true. At bottom, then, I see

little difference between your French Paradox story of 5Nov95 and your Ugly Face of

Freedom story of 23Oct94 - in each case, you ventured beyond your depth, giving

superficial judgments on topics that you were unqualified to speak on, discussing

questions that your education had given you no grounding in, and causing damage because

your conclusions proved to be false.

In the case of the Ugly Face of Freedom, the number of your errors was large, and the

amount of data that needed to be examined to demonstrate your errors was large as well,

as can be seen by the length of my rebuttal The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes. In the case of

the French Paradox, however, you make only one fundamental error which is to fail to

grasp the difference between experimental and correlational data - and my demonstration

of your error can compactly be contained within the present letter.

The reason that I am able to assert with some confidence that your conclusion that wine

drinking increases longevity is unjustified is as follows. I have a Ph.D. in

experimental psychology from Stanford, I taught in the Department of Psychology at the

University of Western Ontario for eleven years, and my teaching and my interests fell

largely into the areas of statistics, research methodology, and data interpretation.

Everyone with expertise in scientific method will agree with me that your conclusion in

The French Paradox was unwarranted. It is not necessary to read the original research

papers on which you rely to arrive at this same judgment - even the brief review of the

research data in your broadcast, even the briefer review of your broadcast in the Kim

Marcus quotations above - is enough for someone who has studied scientific method to see

that you were wrong. Below is my explanation.

The French Paradox Research

Ca

There are two ways in which data relating wine consumption to longevity could have been

gathered - either in an experiment, or in a correlational study. If the data had been

gathered in an experiment, then it would have been done something like this. A number

of subjects (by which I mean human experimental subjects) would have been randomly

assigned to groups, let us say 11 different groups. The benefit of random assignment is