An openly gay city council candidate is targeted by malicious campaign literature suggesting he may be a pedophile and subsequently loses his bid for alderman.
It's the type of story highlighting bigotry and homophobia that the mainstream media would love to trumpet and it happened just days ago in the 2009 city elections in Annapolis, Md.
Unfortunately for Scott Bowling, he's a Republican in the liberal capital city of Maryland.
Aside from coverage in the Annapolis Capital and the Baltimore Sun's Maryland Politics blog, a Google News search and Nexis searches of the AP wire, major newspapers, and network transcripts revealed no coverage of the story in the mainstream media:
A candidate for Annapolis alderman says he will file a complaint with the state Attorney General’s office after an anonymous racist and homophobic flier criticizing his candidacy began circulating last weekend.
The flier, addressed to the “Friends and Supporters of Black Annapolis,” was distributed in public housing developments in Ward 3, where Republican Scott Bowling, who is white, is challenging the Democratic incumbent Classie Hoyle, who is African-American.
The flier states that Bowling “will be a danger to us all and our children,” and makes references to the “risk of sexual assault,” and says that Bowling is “white and gay,” and “wants to push for a pro gay agenda at City Hall.”
“It’s racial, bigoted and prejudiced and this has no place in Annapolis politics,” said Bowling, 38, a mortgage banker.
The flier also compares Bowling, who is openly gay, to Samuel E. Shropshire, the alderman who has been accused of fondling a male midshipman.
Given Annapolis's proximity to Washington, D.C., it's hard to believe that this story would not come to the attention of editors at the Washington Post or the bureau chiefs for the cable news networks in D.C. Yet although the Post has a Maryland Politics blog, the Bowling controversy has not even been covered in that lightly-trafficked portion of the Post's Web page, much less given ink in the dead tree edition.
