A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of The Marion County Record.
Raids of news organizations are exceedingly 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, the police seized computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. They also searched the home of the publication’s owner and semiretired editor as well as the home of a city councilwoman.
The searches, conducted on Friday, appeared to be linked to an investigation into how a document containing information about a local restaurateur found its way to the local newspaper — and whether the restaurant owner’s privacy was violated in the process. The editor of the newspaper said the raids may have had more to do with tensions between the paper and officials in Marion, a town of about 2,000 north of Wichita, over prior 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 dwindling cohort left in their area to hold governments to account. And it fits a pattern of pressure being applied to local newsrooms. One recent example is the 2019 police raid of 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. She warned that the raid was a dangerous attack on press freedom in the country.
“This is not right, this is wrong, this cannot be allowed to stand,” she said.
The newspaper’s owner and editor, Eric Meyer, said in an interview that the newspaper had done nothing wrong. The newspaper did not publish an article about the government record, though Mr. Meyers said that it had received a copy from a confidential source and that one of its reporters had verified its authenticity using the state’s records available online.
In an email, Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, defended the raid, which was earlier reported online by The Marion County Record and by Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news organization.
…
On Sunday, more than 30 news organizations and press freedom advocates, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, signed a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Mr. Cody condemning the raid.
The Marion County Record is uncommonly aggressive for its size. Mr. Meyer said that the newspaper, which has seven employees, has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials, including asking questions about Mr. Cody’s employment history.
I’m not sure if you posted the entire article (can’t check b/c paywall), but I’m surprised the NYT didn’t mention the 98-year-old co-owner of the paper who fucking DIED a day after police raided her home. This whole story is absolutely horrific.
The article ends
Mr. Meyer said he had never experienced government pressure like this. “If we don’t fight back and we don’t win in fighting back, it’s going to silence everybody,” he said. He had returned full time to Marion during the Covid-19 pandemic and stayed on, 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, though he receives an annual bonus if the company turns a profit at the end of the year. On Saturday, his mother died. In an article published online on Saturday evening, the newspaper connected Joan Meyer’s death to the search, writing that it had made her “stressed beyond her limits.” The headline: “Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner.”
Okay good well at least they mentioned it, even if it is at the very end of the article.
I’m so glad this is making the national news.
It’s good that this is starting to get more attention, it cannot go unpunished.
Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, defended the raid
let’s make an example of this little turd
Gideon Cody, free speech denier and mother killer. Real piece of shit.
If anyone is aware of a legal defense fund specifically for this, please share. Dollars and cents will serve the journalists better than thoughts and prayers.
Wait my thoughts and prayers mean nothing? /S. But they told me to pray and it would all be okay… they lied to me.
If you want to share your thoughts about this travesty with the police chief, then you can do so by emailing him at: [email protected].
Why do they have a .net domain as opposed to a Kansas gov domain?
That’s why the press toes the government line. They know what will happen if they don’t.
Idk dude, this is just the story of a power hungry rural bumblefuck sheriff. Press freedom is pretty strong in the USA
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Because there’s so much anti-US propaganda on Lemmy, I feel obliged to point out:
- Russia is 164/180
- China is 2nd worst of all countries at 179/180
I looked at that source and most of thr US’s dings seem to he security. But note that the source says that basically no one gets arrested or killed by the government for being a journalist. Thus, I’m gonna say that it’s mostly our crazy populous, which with the climate after Trunp makes sense.
The original point that the US has strong protections (by the government) for the the press stands. We just can’t do anything aboutnpur citizens.
It shouldn’t even be a “battleground”. Sheriff and his four soldiers stepped way out of line.
This is just one story about it. Many journalists under the last 3 administrations have had raids and seizures of their devices. It’s an extremely disturbing development, but it actually dates back to the Wilson administration. It’s not nearly as new or as rare as it sounds.
This is exactly why we need a free press and a non-corrupt government at all levels. It goes without saying, but an asshole sheriff shouldn’t be able to fuck with the nearby citizens without consequence.
A non-corrupt government, by nature, will never exist. That’s why the press needs to exist, until it also becomes corrupt. There seems to be no difference between the national press and the government in the US. I remember when I was a kid, I thought the press was part of the government. I kept seeing government officials going to work for the press and I just assumed it was one big organization. Now that I’ve gotten older and understand what’s going on, I realize that I understood more as a kid than I thought I did.
The only way the sheriff will be reigned in is by the local citizenry. If they ignore it or accept it, then there’s nothing to to stop him.
* toes the line
As in, they step up to the line in the sand and put their toes near it. They don’t cross the line.
Sorry, I know it’s pedantic, but I failed my save to resist pedantry.
Auto correct is a bitch sometimes.
Why is this comment getting downvoted? Serious question. This comment describes the chilling effect upon the free press that this governmental abuse will have.
