Kill. Bury. Print.: How the news gets broken

The crime
Good Lord, where to start. According to, among others, family-business local paper the McCurtain County Gazette, local law enforcement – and in particular former sheriff Kevin Clardy and deputy Alicia Manning – allegedly mishandled evidence; failed to investigate disappearances; took drugs; engaged in inappropriate intra-department relationships; violated local statute as to proper contact with county commissioners; abused prisoners in the county jail; and, once the Gazette reported these allegations, made racist comments, talked about hiring hit men to silence Gazette editorial, and defamed Gazette reporter Chris Willingham by tying him to a convicted pedophile.

As of this writing, litigation is ongoing.

The story
Googling “McCurtain County scandal” turns up a couple of results, thanks to the recent bookings of the Daveys for allegedly embezzling millions from local businesses starting in March of 2021; that of course is not the scandal Kill. Bury. Print. is concerned with. Directed by Ben Klein (The Exiles), KBP returns us to a big story from a few years back, the mortal struggle between a rural Oklahoma county’s newspaper and that county’s seemingly corrupt and/or inept sheriff’s department. 

I dimly remembered that battle blowing up. It blew up as big as it did, I think, because it spoke to profound anxieties on the part of journalists (and those of us “civilians” who still want to consider newspapers a public trust) about the death of print, the throttling of local journalism by national syndicates and AI, and the willingness (and, often, ability) of law enforcement to “disappear” reporting on their own malfeasance. 

None of those anxieties has receded since that scandal broke, but does that mean KBP is per se worth watching? Or is it an 86-minute exercise in congratulating itself – and its audience – on its “right thinking”?

It’s not that second thing, in my opinion…or at least not only or off-puttingly that second thing. Yes, KBP has “a side” and wants the viewer on it, and it oversteps at least once in that regard, namely choosing to repeat an assertion that Kevin Clardy was “tweaking” in a TV-news interview. Brett Fieldcamp’s review for the OKC Free Press feels that

the film repeatedly undermines itself by shoehorning in a bunch of flat-out inflammatory stuff about Clardy that doesn’t need to be included and that is totally unfounded.

Klein sees fit to include loads of speculation about Clardy’s possibly inappropriate relationship with Manning, the implication that his office didn’t do enough to find missing persons or solve major crimes, and an especially egregious moment that openly accuses Clardy of being high on meth with absolutely no proof or recourse. 

I concur that that moment is unnecessary, and not just because I watched almost every episode of Intervention and that interview wasn’t reading “meth” to me. I also agree, sort of, that the “didn’t do enough” allegations in KBP don’t quite work, but it’s more that the narrative thread of the disappearances gets dropped by the doc – in a way that felt like KBP may have begun its life as a three-parter, then gotten re-containerized as feature-length – than that it’s rumor-mongering.

Fieldcamp concedes that Clardy and Manning declined to participate in the documentary or even issue a statement via counsel, and that, as I mentioned, ongoing litigation proscribes some “testimony.” That doesn’t mean Klein and executive producer Rachel Maddow, and the people they did have talking-head access to, didn’t drop thumbs on the scale of audience sympathies, of course, but Fieldcamp seems to find that disqualifying in a way I don’t, and never have.

An effective documentary will have an “agenda”; it’s not a transcript, and both-sidesing a story for the sake of forestalling that criticism will feel like exactly that. (For what it’s worth, KBP does talk to Clardy “sympathizers” and include the “the Gazette had a vendetta against the sheriff’s office” point of view. You can almost hear the production holding its nose, but it is in fact done.)

And KBP is effective. Whether it was always envisioned as a feature or not, the length works for the story; the pacing, particularly to start, is properly brisk and brings the viewer up to speed, while also including small-press process visuals that this viewer found cromulently soothing. It gets access to the whole Willingham family, most of the rest of the Gazette staff, and former sheriffs and local investigators. It isn’t condescending about the concerns and mores of rural areas. I didn’t see a single water tower. 

The documentary could have gone into more depth on the death of Alyssa Donaldson, I suppose, or set up from an angle recounting the entire history of the Gazette, but it wanted to tell this specific story – and it wanted to tell it, I imagine, because the story isn’t unique to McCurtain County, or to the 2020s. Newsrooms keep shrinking, cops keep fucking up, private-equity “executive editors” keep bowing to ownership pressure on editorial. Positioning Gazette publisher/patriarch Bruce Willingham as a 21st-century inkstained Atticus Finch won’t work for everyone…but on the other hand, it’s not necessarily Kill. Bury. Print. that does that, but the times we live in. And Atticus Finch endures culturally for a reason.

KBP isn’t a perfect, or perfectly objective, document, but it’s very watchable and textured, and it does what it sets out to do. 

Recommendation: WATCH

The case in favor:

• A well-paced and -contained 86 minutes
• Few AV genre cliches; pleasing to look at and visually textured
• The broader implications of the story are compelling

The case against:

• Might be too “meta” for some
• A couple of unsubstantiated claims make Clardy cartoonier than needed