DIGGING UP 'ROOTS': Tomorrow, NBC will air a special on the 25th anniversary of the television landmark "Roots." There will be a lot of media back-slapping for bringing an important and too-often-overlooked part of American history to light. The only problem, as Eric Fettmann points out, is that a lot of Alex Haley's work is false or plagiarised, and has been proven so in a court of law. Fettmann's words: "True, Haley's literary fraud doesn't alter the historical reality of slavery and its evils, or the pernicious lasting effect it had on America. But there's a pernicious paternalism at work when it's suggested that an ostensible work of history shouldn't be held to account merely because its heart is in the right place."