Censorship in Alabama?
An Alabama CBS affiliate showed dead air during a '60 Minutes' segment suggesting the corruption prosecution of former Democratic governor Don Siegelman was politically motivated. The station blamed technical problems, said The New York Times in an editor
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
What happened
A CBS affiliate in northern Alabama showed dead air during a segment of “60 Minutes” that raised questions about the prosecution of former governor Don Siegelman, who was jailed last June on corruption charges. The segment linked the federal prosecution of Siegelman, a Democrat, to GOP strategist Karl Rove. The station, WHNT, initially blamed Sunday's 12-minute outage on CBS, but later said its satellite receiver had malfunctioned; it rebroadcast the 13-minute segment twice. (Reuters) “The receiver failed at the worst possible time, and there’s nothing I can do to make some people believe it,” said WHNT general manager Stan Pylant. (AP via Google News)
What the commentators said
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
WHNT’s “technical problems” certainly look suspicious, said The New York Times in an editorial (free registration), especially in a state where eerily similar reports of “cable trouble” were used to avoid showing a 1955 report on racial desegregation. Adding to the intrigue, WHNT is owned by a private equity firm led by Bush’s ex-business partner who, with his brother, are “generous contributors to Republican causes.” But “if the blackout was intentional, it may also have been counterproductive,” as it raised the profile of the Siegelman case and “lent support” to the partisan-conspiracy charges.
“We’re not quite ready to accept any conspiracy theory,” said the University of Alabama Crimson White in an editorial. Yes, Siegelman’s trial did “have a certain air of shadiness,” but even without the “possible federal impropriety,” Siegelman “played fast and loose with ethical rules” throughout his governorship, and so he owns “some responsibility for his fate.” The charges from “60 Minutes” should be “fully investigated,” but Siegelman gets “very little sympathy.”
He deserves more than sympathy, said Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine. Siegelman’s imprisonment is a “personal tragedy,” a “gross miscarriage of justice,” and the result of “a corrupt vendetta that involved political hacks, politically motivated Justice Department figures, and a politicized judiciary.” But the “veneer of normalcy” around the case pushed by the “Koolaid-dispensing local media” is becoming “increasingly futile” to maintain, so maybe this is a turning point in this shoddy attempt to turn “our nation into a banana republic.”
After years of rumors and charges, the local “mainstream media” was “convinced Siegelman was guilty and ready to move on,” said Tom Baxter in Southern Political Report. But left-leaning blogs and smaller local papers always kept the story alive. So if WHNT had “any intention of suppressing the story”—which it denies—a TV blackout was a “quaintly old-fashioned,” and certainly doomed, tool to use.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
-
Support schemes to help first-time buyers onto the property ladder
The Explainer Purchasing a home is expensive but first-time buyers can get help
By Marc Shoffman, The Week UK Published
-
Chris Packham: Is It Time to Break the Law? review
Channel 4 documentary grapples with 'profound' questions about the 'climate apocalypse'
By The Week Staff Published
-
How do we calculate mass deaths?
The Explainer Recent revisions to 9/11 victims, Libyan flood casualties and Covid-19 death toll raise questions over estimates
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published