From the 60 Minutes message boards: "first 12 minutes of Seigleman segment not shown in Alabama"

Hello everyone!  

I am the Station Manager/News Director at WHNT-TV.  I feel
compelled to post to this site today to clear up the
misconceptions about what happened at our station on Sunday,
Feb. 24.  Last night at the worst possible moment, we had a
technical failure of a piece of equipment that allows us to
receive feeds from CBS.  It happened just as the 60 Minutes
segment on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was about to
air.

Initially, we thought the problem was on CBS' end.  That was a
logical assumption on our part as we had problems just 24
hours prior during a CBS televised basketball game.  Upon
further investigation, WHNT learned that the problem was on
our end at the station.  WHNT engineers responded as quickly
as possible to diagnose the problem and were able to restore
the feed with a few minutes left in the Siegelman segment.  

As you might imagine with a story of such intense local
interest, our phone lines and emails were bombarded with
complaints and rightly so.  That's why we requested and were
granted permission from CBS to re-air the segment in its
entirety on Sunday night during our late news, NewsChannel 19
at 10pm.   We also posted a link on WHNT.com to a streaming
video clip of the entire segment.

Still, many people indicated to us that they missed it at 10pm
because they did not get word that it would re-air.  So, once
again we asked and were granted permission from CBS to again
re-air the "Prosecution of Don Siegelman" segment. 
It will air again tonight (Monday) on NewsChannel 19 at 6pm.  
We are abbreviating our news, weather and sportscasts in order
to do this.  And, we are pre-empting all commercials in order
to make this happen.

We have received hundreds of emails and phone calls from
viewers who accused us purposely sabotaging the broadcast for
political reasons.  I can understand how people might think
that was the case.  But, I assure you that it is patently
false.  We have been working to remedy this problem.  CBS has
bent over backwards to help us through this very regrettable
situation.  If we were conspiring to blackout this story from
the public, we wouldn't have promoted it heavily in our
newscasts in the days preceding.  No one would invite such a
public relations nightmare like this on themselves.

We apologize to all viewers of the Tennessee Valley for the
interruption.  We assure them and you there was no intent
whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast. 

I hope readers of this forum will accept our sincere
apologies.  

Anyone who wishes to engage in further dialogue about this,
may do so by emailing me directly at denise.vickers@whnt.com.

Sincerely,
Denise Vickers
Station Manager/News Director
WHNT-TV