UCCA petition for reconsideration argues FCC ignored public interest (08/27/95)

UCCA petition for reconsideration argues FCC ignored public interest

WASHINGTON - The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reverse a decision that the UCCA says will provide a "safe harbor" for broadcast attacks upon ethnic groups in the U.S.

A petition for reconsideration filed by UCCA President Askold Lozynskyj on August 18 argued that the FCC ignored the public interest when it denied the Ukrainian American community legal standing to bring a personal attack complaint based upon the CBS broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom" and when it held that the broadcast affected only Ukrainians in Ukraine.

The UCCA contends that Ukrainian Americans, like other ethnic groups in the U.S., are an "identifiable group" entitled to legal standing, and that they were collectively stigmatized by statements in the broadcast impugning Ukrainians as "genetically anti-Semitic." The UCCA termed genetic accusations "a repugnant and virulent form of racism" reminiscent of anti-Jewish propaganda during Hitler's Third Reich.

The August 18 petition for reconsideration is the UCCA's final pleading to the FCC prior to its appeal to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. The UCCA asserts that reconsideration of the FCC's July 19 decision is in the public interest because the case has broad application to the rights of all of America's ethnic groups to seek redress for broadcast attacks upon their members.

In urging a rehearing, the UCCA contends that Ukrainian Americans were expressly singled out in the broadcast as subjects of defamatory and unfounded accusations when "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer asserted that the Galicia Division, including members now living in the U.S., helped round up and exterminate 140,000 of Lviv's Jews.

In actuality, the UCCA petition points out, Canada's Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals determined in 1986 that charges of war crimes against the Galicia Division had "never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first proffered, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this commission." The commission concluded that accusations against the Galicia Division had been "nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government, through the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and this commission, to a considerable amount of purposeless work." A British government report in 1947 determined that not only were all members of the Galicia Division entitled to treatment as displaced persons but that "immediate action" should be taken for their protection, in order to assure that they were not repatriated to the Soviet Union.

The UCCA contends that the FCC's July 19 decision, by denying the Ukrainian American community legal standing as an identifiable group, gave rise to the implication that "ethnic groups may not claim the protection of the commission's rules, and that broadcasters have a license to attack them with impunity." In a nation that proudly proclaims its immigrant heritage, the UCCA states, "this cannot and should not be the law."

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