Pittsburgh station swap gets new wave of attention

Recent coverage of Sen. John McCain’s conflicts of interest has refocused attention on his role in the attempted sale of WQEX-TV, sister station of Pittsburgh’s WQED, and his ties to lobbyist Vicki Iseman, who was involved in the deal. Iseman was “terrific, very aggressive and very supportive of what we were trying to do,” said WQED President George Miles in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article. In a defense of McCain published on the Huffington Post, Lanny Davis, WQED’s lobbyist at the time, says “what I wanted Senator McCain to do, he refused to do. And he did so out of a concern of appearances of impropriety. That is a fact.” (Earlier coverage in Current of the WQEX sale.) UPDATE: Today’s Democracy Now! features an interview with Angela Campbell, the attorney for the community groups that tried to block the sale of WQEX.