A small town in Kansas has become a First Amendment battleground, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the Marion County Record’s office.
Raids on news organizations are extremely rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists. At the Record, a family-owned paper with a circulation of about 4,000, police seized the computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. They also ransacked the home of the publication’s owner and semiretired editor as well as the home of a city councillor.
The searches, conducted Friday, appear to be related to an investigation into how a document containing information about a local restaurateur ended up in the local newspaper — and whether the restaurant owner’s privacy was violated in the process. . The newspaper’s editor said the raids may have more to do with tensions between the paper and officials in Marion, a town of about 2,000 north of Wichita, in earlier coverage.
The raid is one of several recent cases of local authorities taking aggressive actions against news organizations — some of which are part of a shrinking group left in their place to hold governments accountable. And it fits a recent pattern of pressure being applied to local newsrooms. A recent example is the 2019 police raid on the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, who was reporting on the death of Jeff Adachi, a longtime public defender.
“There’s a lot of healthy tension between the government and newspapers, but this?” Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said in an interview about the raid in Marion. He warned that the raid was a dangerous attack against press freedom in the country.
“This is not right, this is wrong, this cannot be allowed to stand,” he said.
The newspaper’s owner and editor, Eric Meyer, said in an interview that the newspaper did nothing wrong. The newspaper did not publish an article about the government record, although Mr. Meyers said it had received a copy from a confidential source and that one of its reporters had verified its authenticity with state records available online.
In an email, Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, defended the raid, which was first reported online by Marion County Record and by Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news organization.
“I believe when the rest of the story becomes available to the public, the judicial system in question will be vindicated,” Mr. Cody said. He declined to discuss the investigation in detail.
The Marion County Record is unusually aggressive for its size. Mr. Meyer said the newspaper, which has seven employees, had drawn the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials, including an inquiry into Mr. Cody’s work history.
The paper is handled by Mr. Meyer, who is 69 and has a long career in journalism, works as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and is a professor at the University of Illinois. He also has a family connection to the Marion County Record: His father, Bill, worked there for half a century beginning in 1948, rising to become its top editor.
In 1998, his family bought the newspaper and two others nearby — the Hillsboro Star-Journal and Peabody Gazette-Bulletin — from the former publisher, the Hoch family, which had owned them for 124 years.
The government record dispute that led to the raid might not have been an issue except for a tip that came after a meet-and-greet held Aug. 2 for local congressman Jake LaTurner at Kari’s Kitchen, an establishment that – property by Kari Newell, a local restaurateur.
Ms. asked Newell to the police chief to remove Mr. Meyer and a reporter, Phyllis Zorn, from the event, saying he didn’t want them to attend.
After the newspaper published an article about the episode, Ms. Zorn of a private Facebook message, Mr. Meyer said, from someone who shared the letter with Ms. Newell from the Kansas Department of Revenue. The letter detailed the steps he needed to take to get his driver’s license back, which was suspended after a drunken driving citation in 2008, according to the newspaper.
Last Monday, Ms. Newell at a City Council meeting seeking approval to operate an establishment that serves alcohol. He accused the newspaper at the meeting of illegally obtaining the letter and giving it to a councilwoman, Ruth Herbel. Ms. Herbel, whose home was also searched Friday, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Meyer said the newspaper did not share the document with Ms. Herbel. He added that Ms. Newell told the newspaper that the release of the information may be related to his ongoing divorce proceedings.
A search warrant for the raid, issued by a judge about an hour before the Friday morning search, cited Ms. Newell and cited potential violations of laws involving identity theft and the illegal use of a computer. The latter, among other things, prohibits the use of a computer “with the intent to defraud or obtain money, property, services or any other thing of value by false or fraudulent pretense or representation. ”
A spokesman for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which assists criminal justice agencies across the state, said Marion police approached the bureau to assist in an investigation into the “illegal access and dissemination of confidential criminal justice information.”
Although news organizations are sometimes the targets of legal actions by government officials, including subpoenas seeking interview notes and other records, the search and seizure tools to produce journalism is rare.
Seth Stern, advocacy director at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers, said federal law allows police to search journalists when authorities have probable cause. to believe that journalists have committed a crime unrelated to their reporting. That exception does not apply, however, in a case where the alleged crime is garnering news, he said. When journalists are suspected of committing crimes as part of gathering news, the government’s option is to serve a subpoena, which can be challenged in court before it is enforced.
“You can’t say, ‘I’m allowed to raid the newsroom because I’m investigating a crime,’ if the crime you’re investigating is journalism,” he added.
The police chief, Mr. Cody, who started work this spring, and Ms. Newell argued that journalists would be subject to searches if they themselves were suspects in the crime being investigated. said Ms. Newell that someone illegally used her identity to obtain private information about her online.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Newell framed the dispute as a direct violation of his newspaper privacy rather than a First Amendment battle.
“There’s a big difference between being vindictive and taking revenge,” Ms. Newell. “I truly believe this is a vindictive move, full of malice. And I hope in the end, I receive vindication.”
The newspaper, which publishes weekly on Wednesdays, is scrambling to produce the next edition without most of its computers and servers, which contain articles as well as ads and public notices.
Mr. Meyer said he had never experienced government pressure like this.
“If we don’t fight and we don’t win the fight, it will silence everyone,” he said.
He returned to Marion full-time during the Covid-19 pandemic and stayed, retiring from his university post and spending more time writing and editing for the newspaper, and living with his 98-year-old mother He said he does not receive a salary, although he does receive an annual bonus if the company makes a profit at the end of the year.
On Saturday, his mother died. In an article published online Saturday night, the Record connected Joan Meyer’s death to the search, writing that it “stressed her beyond her limits.” The headline: “Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner.”
Jack Begg contributed research.