In Alabama, TV Watches You

I fought the law, and the law won

Evidently, a CBS affiliate in Northern Alabama blacked out a 60 Minutes story critical of the U.S. Justice Department's political railroading of that state's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman. You can watch the offending piece, which details a litany of gross abuses of prosecutorial discretion and a pattern of political manipulation of the justice system leading all the way to Karl Rove. If it all sounds familiar, that's because Siegelman's case was a sideshow in the three ring circus that was last year's Congressional investigation of the Bush administration's, shall we say, questionable handling of the U.S. Attorneys.

From the New York Times' media blog The Lede:

...many Alabamans did not see initial broadcast of the report, which included new allegations that Karl Rove, President Bush’s former top adviser, waged a campaign against Mr. Siegelman.

Instead, just before the segment was to start, people in the northern part of the state who were tuned in to WHNT-TV, Channel 19 in Huntsville, found this on their screen instead:

We apologize that you missed the first segment of 60 Minutes tonight featuring ‘The Prosecution of Don Siegelman.’ It was a technical problem with CBS out of New York.

Upon hearing reports of the missed segment from readers, Scott Horton, a writer blogging at Harper’s, phoned CBS headquarters in New York, which offered him a startling contradiction:

“There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters.” I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama “could only have been an editorial call.”

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, American troops continue to fight, and die, nominally to secure the blessings of liberty for the people of Iraq.