Morgan Bowling called from Kentucky after Tuesday’s press
conference. “I’m really curious to see how the national news
reports it,” she said, referring to the conclusion
of state and federal law enforcement officials that Bill
Sparkman’s death was a suicide.
Bowling is the 20-year-old news director of the
Manchester
Enterprise, a 6,500-circulation weekly that
is the main source for local news in Clay County, Ky. For a few
days in September, Bowling’s hometown made national headlines
after Sparkman’s nude body was discovered Sept. 12 near a
cemetery about 15 miles from Manchester in an area known locally
as Red Bird.
Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census worker and
teacher’s aide, had apparently been hanged, and Bowling reported
the story on the front page of that week’s
Enterprise, with a quote from a Kentucky
State Patrol spokesman: “The circumstances of the case right now
are very sketchy.”
The circumstances remained sketchy — and the national news
media paid scant attention to Sparkman’s death — until Sept. 23,
when the Associated Press
published a story that began: “The FBI is investigating
whether anti-government sentiment led to the hanging death of a
U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement
official told The Associated Press the word ‘fed’ was scrawled on
the dead man’s chest.”
Attributed to a “law enforcement official, who was not
authorized to discuss the case,” the AP’s reference to
“anti-government sentiment” inspired sensational headlines
(e.g., “Terror in Kentucky: Census Worker’s
Murder,” CBS.com) and
some of the wildest commentary since the invention of
blogging.
In particular, liberals focused blame on Rep. Michelle
Bachmann, who had expressed concerns about Census Bureau
intrusions of privacy. Liberal blogger I think people in
positions of power inciting hate and violence need to be held
accountable.… Political hate-speech is just as dangerous as any
other form of hate-speech.”
Faiz Shakir of
Think Progress accused Bachmann of fomenting “anger, fear, and
vitriol” against Census workers, but liberal bloggers agreed that
the Minnesota Republican had many co-conspirators, including Tea
Party protesters and Rush Limbaugh. Andrew Sullivan blamed “Southern
populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox News and
talk radio cohorts.” Rick
Ungar contributed the memorable headline: “Send the Body to
Glenn Beck.”
The Left’s certainty that someone —
everyone! — in the conservative movement
was to blame for Sparkman’s demise clearly required a scapegoat.
Finally Michelle Malkin
confessed: “I killed the Kentucky Census worker — along with
every conservative in America.”
That was apparently what Bill Sparkman wanted everyone to
believe. Investigators said yesterday that evidence shows
Sparkman wrote “fed” on his own chest, duct-taped his Census ID
to his own neck, and hanged himself. Sparkman staged his death to
look like murder, police said, in an apparent attempt to let his
beneficiaries collect $600,000 in life-insurance benefits.
Sparkman evidently was willing to let his death be blamed
on “anti-government sentiment” — and on the people of Clay
County. Or, as the
Washington Post made sure to describe it,
“impoverished Clay County.”
Newspaper references to rural Appalachian poverty might
evoke images of dilapidated cabins with tin roofs and dirt
floors, full of barefoot hillbillies with corncob pipes. But
those stereotypes bear no resemblance to the Clay County I
visited in September.
Manchester is home to a regional campus of Eastern Kentucky
University and, in general, resembles a lot of other small towns
in America. On the day I arrived, the local Pizza Hut was crowded
with Clay County High School cheerleaders holding a fund-raiser,
and teenage boys were riding their skateboards on the
shopping-center sidewalk near the Dollar General store.
There were no grizzled moonshiners and no right-wing
militias, and no more “anti-government sentiment” than you’d
expect, considering how the federal government has cracked down
on local enterprises like coal mining and tobacco farming.
Thanks to an anonymous source in an Associated Press story
and a flurry of speculation by bloggers, however, this quiet
community was imagined to be a seething cauldron of hatred stoked
by Fox News, talk radio and Republican politicians. Clay County’s
state Sen. Robert Stivers told the Lexington
Herald-Leader that “many in the media owe
the county an apology.” As Morgan Bowling said Tuesday afternoon,
at times it seemed as if pundits were trying to turn Bill
Sparkman into a “sacrificial lamb for ObamaCare.”
At the height of the national media glare, the
Manchester Enterprise’s young editor
received an e-mail from New York: “What are you people, backwoods
ignorant freaks?” the e-mailer wrote. “This crime is a reflection
of all the residents of Clay County.… You are all disgusting
pigs, and if one could level a curse at a community, then I curse
the whole lot of you.”
Morgan Bowling is only a few months into her journalism
career, but she got a crash course about what can happen when
irresponsible reporting leads to unfounded
speculation.
