FCC Official Wants Probe of "60 Minutes" Black-Out

A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

"The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

The "60 Minutes" segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

The blackout of the segment in Huntsville prompted an editorial in The New York Times the following week that raised comparisons between the WHNT incident and systematic efforts by a Mississippi TV station to suppress information about the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

WHNT denied that the blackout was politically motivated. It said it had failed to get the segment on the air because of an equipment failure at the station that cut off the feed from CBS. WHNT said the problem was corrected a few minutes before the end of the Siegelman segment.

In a posting on WHNT's Web site, the station's news director, Denise Vickers, said the station had been "bombarded" with complaints and accusations that the station had sabotaged the broadcast for political reasons.

"But I assure everyone that the notion is patently false," Vickers wrote in her Web site posting. "Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??"

WHNT was sold along with eight other stations by The New York Times Co last year to the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Station managers requested and received permission from CBS to re-air the segment twice in the following days, Vickers said.

Copps said on Monday the FCC should move quickly to "determine the facts" surrounding the incident.

"If the decision was intentional, who made the decision and why? The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this," Copps said. (Reporting by Peter Kaplan; editing by Stuart Grudgings)

Power Line: We've written a couple of times about the 60 Minutes story last Sunday that claimed former Alabama governor Don Siegelman was the victim of a Republican conspiracy that sent him to prison for bribery and mail fraud. The story implicitly accused the career prosecutors who handled the case of complicity in the alleged conspiracy, but the real focus of CBS's account was Karl Rove. The network's star witness was a small-time Alabama lawyer named Jill Simpson, who claimed she was a life-long Republican, but had stepped forward to tell what she knew about events in 2001 and 2002.

The centerpiece of Simpson's account, as presented on 60 Minutes, was her claim that she did "opposition research" for the Republican Party in Alabama at the request of Karl Rove. She said that in 2001, while Siegelman was still governor, Rove asked her to follow Siegelman around and try to get photos of the Governor in bed ("in a compromising sexual position") with one of his female aides. Not only that: Simpson said that this request by Rove didn't surprise her, because Rove had asked her to carry out other secret missions in the past.

Put aside for a moment the inherent stupidity of this account. CBS aired it without disclosing the fact that Simpson has told her story several times before--without mentioning that she had ever met or spoken to Karl Rove, let alone that he asked her to spy for him. More ->

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