Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | September 29, 2026
Over the weekend, Robert Pattinson’s Primetime hit theaters. It’s essentially a movie about journalism at its worst. I loathed it.
Kill. Bury. Print, a new documentary on Peacock, is its polar opposite. Executive produced by Rachel Maddow, it’s about journalism at its best, and about what that costs you in this America. It’s about perseverance, about doggedness, about refusing to let a story go no matter the personal toll. And this one cost one family dearly. I loved it, because it shows that there are still corners of small-town America where newspaper editors are willing to stand up to the powerful and the corrupt and keep printing, consequences be damned.
The doc takes place in McCurtain County, Oklahoma (population 33,000), where the Willingham family runs the McCurtain Gazette. Bruce and Gwen, both in their 70s, own and operate the paper along with their son, Chris (the crime reporter), and his wife, Angie. It prints three times a week. When the doc was shooting (up through 2024), the paper didn’t even have an online presence, and the front page was devoted exclusively to local news.
There’s plenty of it, too. This small county seems to be dominated by the sort of crime that dominates impoverished areas: drugs, domestic violence, and a disturbing number of missing people. The McCurtain Gazette covered all of it, and things ran as usual until Kevin Clardy was elected sheriff. Late in his first term, the paper began looking into allegations that Clardy was having an affair with Alicia Manning, who had shot up through the ranks of the department, much to the dismay of several other officers.
More or less for asking questions about the affair, Clardy’s office cut off the McCurtain Gazette’s access, and it spiraled from there. And boy, did it spiral. A man was hog-tied during his arrest and later died in custody (the body cams were, conveniently, turned off), and the McCurtain Gazette reported it on it. Then Bruce, using a hidden recording device, caught the sheriff, Manning, and a county commissioner talking about lynching Black people and putting a hit out on Chris, the publisher’s son.
That story went national. The commissioner resigned. The sheriff did not. Instead, the sheriff’s office began circulating allegations that Chris was involved in a pedophile ring. This is small-town Oklahoma. Rumors like that stick, even when they’re not true. Even when there are never any arrests. Even when the person making the accusation skips town. Even when Chris files a libel suit.
And that’s when Bruce got really mad. I won’t say anything more, except that journalism can speak truth to power, it can bring justice, and sometimes it can even exact retribution. Not all heroes wear capes, y’all. Some of them are old men running tiny print newspapers in small-town conservative America who are fed the hell up and use their modest platform to go full Denzel on somebody’s corrupt ass. It is Old Testament satisfying.
I love this documentary because it shows that, despite everything else battering the journalism industry — presidents kicking out networks, media consolidation, institutional corruption, the TikTok-ification of news — some folks still know how to use the printed word (and I do mean printed) to vanquish the villains.
‘Kill. Bury. Print’ is streaming on Peacock.
