No Comment
By Scott Horton
February 25, 8:44 PM
The Great Tennessee Valley Blackout
My mailbox has filled up with comments from people focusing on the “technical difficulties” that stopped transmission of the Don Siegelman feature—and just that segment—in last night’s 60 Minutes. In a sense, this was symptomatic of what I’ve discovered in eight months of burrowing into the intersection of law and politics in Alabama. It always reminds me of that powerful opener in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” We see a bucolic scene in small town America—everything is happy and wonderful. Then the camera burrows into the grass and zooms in and we see that it’s filled with menacing, frightening wicked things. Nothing about the Siegelman case functioned the way it was supposed to function, right from the beginning. But the veneer of normalcy was maintained, and a Koolaid-dispensing local media tenaciously held to the line that everything was just as it should be. Anyone who questioned what happened was coarsely derided as a whacko conspiracy theorist or a Siegelman fanatic.
So should we be surprised that last night’s events are disrupted at the Huntsville CBS affiliate, and the Huntsville Times deals with the question by posting on its website the official explanation of the station, while the New York Times gives the event in-depth coverage, comparing it with Pakistan’s war against YouTube? To be more precise, the Alabama media is now split between the independent small newspapers, whose suspicion about the story has been deeply aroused, and the Advance newspapers in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville. In a scene out of another movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” the Advance papers continue to insist that their readers not look at the man standing behind that curtain! But that effort is becoming increasingly futile, and it is slowly destroying the reservoir of trust they have in the communities they should be serving.
In fact, the national media has not paid so much attention to Alabama since George Corley Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. And there’s every reason to believe that its interest is strongly growing. The politicization of the Justice Department is a front-burner issue on the national stage, and no state offers such a perfect demonstration of all the things that make the issue so troubling as Alabama. Its other attraction is Karl Rove’s undeniable connection to the Siegelman story. (Of course, Rove steadfastly denies the undeniable, which will only serve to strengthen his reputation as the maker of alternate realities.)
Today I received a number of appeals, including one from the CFO of the station’s owner, insisting that WHNT does not practice censorship and noting that the segment was being rebroadcast, yesterday evening at 10:20 p.m., and again this evening at 6:00 p.m. This decisions to rerun the program satisfy me that the station’s management is not bent on depriving North Alabamans of an opportunity to see the program. But the circumstances of the whole event, and the fact that the station first put out a false explanation leave me troubled. Here is WHNT’s account:
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