FCC probes "60 Minutes" blackout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday opened an inquiry into a local television station in Alabama that blacked out a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes."

The FCC issued a "notice of inquiry" to WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in connection with an outage that cut off a segment of the February 24 broadcast of "60 Minutes," an FCC spokeswoman said.

WHNT, which has blamed the black-out on equipment failure, has 30 days to respond with an explanation of what happened in the incident.

"If the FCC decides to review this case, we are confident that the facts speak for themselves and there will be no need for a (follow-up) investigation," Pam Taylor, chief financial officer of the holding company that owns WHNT, said in a statement on Tuesday.

At issue is a "60 Minutes" segment that centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

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

The February 24 black-out provoked a barrage of complaints to the station and prompted one of the two Democrats on the five-member commission to call for an inquiry.

Democratic commissioner Michael Copps questioned on Monday whether the black-out was a "an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves."

WHNT has 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.

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.

Reuters/Nielsen