Siegelman blackout update

Looks like someone isn’t buying the story that an Alabama television station had a 12-minute technical problem while a 13-minute investigate story about the GOP’s railroading the former Democratic governor of Alabama all the way to prison.

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?"

And what about the odds that the FCC chairman will initiate such an investigation?

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.

Martin
So what do we know about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin? According to his online bio, before joining the FCC, Martin was a special assistant to the president for economic policy. A donor to Bush during the 2000 election cycle, he was deputy general counsel for the Bush campaign and served on the Bush-Cheney transition team. He also was a lobbyist for media conglomerates Gannett, Viacom and AH Belo.

Is Martin is just another Republican public servant who has no interest in serving the public? Just another hack crony doing the bidding of the worst administration ever to foul this great country? Sure sounds like it. But let's allow his actions on this matter to answer those questions.