To the editor:

I am disappointed, (but not surprised) that America’s media have failed once again in their appointed task of informing the electorate. The latest evidence of willful neglect (by an increasingly corporate-owned fourth estate) regards the lack of coverage on a recent “60 Minutes” news report about former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, now in prison.

Under oath to the House Judiciary Committee, and again on “60 Minutes,” an Alabama attorney, Jill Simpson, charged that a former chief adviser to President Bush was deeply involved in repeated efforts to bring down Siegelman through the use of the federal Justice Department. Fifty-two former attorneys general, both Republican and Democrat, are now pushing Congress to investigate what they see as an unwarranted targeting of a successful Democratic governor in a Republican state.

In an interesting side note, when the “60 Minutes” episode aired, large parts of Alabama suddenly had a blackout of their TVs, but only on CBS and only for the length of the Siegelman feature.

Serious allegations have been made, under oath, that a key figure in President Bush’s administration used the U.S. Justice Department as a weapon. Rove is accused of having someone imprisoned because they were from the other political party. These are the kind of things that happen in totalitarian states, not in the kind of America I grew up in. As of March 2, the Lawrence Journal-World has not printed a single word of these disturbing developments. Shameful.

Daniel Patrick Schamle,

Lawrence