First they came for the Marion County Record–who is next?

By Teri Sprackland

On Friday, August 11, a small weekly newspaper in Marion, Kansas, was raided by local police on the pretext of searching for criminal evidence related to an identity theft accusation.

A search warrant, issued but later retracted for lack of cause, provided the town’s newly hired police chief, Gideon Cody, a pretext to seize the newspaper’s? computers, various cell phones and other equipment essential to the paper’s publication. The police also raided the home of the town’s vice mayor, Ruth Herbel, who the police chief believed might be implicated by an accusation of identity theft from a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who was irate that her drunk driving record had been accessed when she applied for a liquor license. The newspaper has vigorously denied illegally accessing or disseminating information that Newell’s driver’s license had been suspended due to a 2008 DUI.

The home of 98-year-old Joan Meyer, the mother of publisher Eric Meyer and herself co-owner of the newspaper, was also subjected to a prolonged search. (Mrs. Meyer had herself worked as the paper’s community editor for many years.) The police raid contributed to such distress that she died the next day of sudden cardiac failure, in the midst of a conversation about what had happened, according to Eric Meyer.

“These are Hitler tactics,” Mrs. Meyer had said, according to reporting in the Marion County Record. ”Where have all the good people gone who are supposed to keep this from happening?”

Marion is a small rural town in central Kansas with a population of about 2,000 people; its newspaper has been published under local family ownership since shortly after the Civil War.?

Outrage at the attack on the newspaper quickly spread, bringing statements of support from major American news outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and The Wall Street Journal as well as garnering coverage from international publications. Funding is being raised by the Society of Professional Journalists to help pay legal costs incurred by the small newspaper. Since then, more than a quarter-million people have accessed the paper’s news site (www.marionrecord.com) and its 4,000 subscriber base has more than doubled.?

Meyer and his mother have been co-owners of Hoch Publishing, which also publishes the Hillsboro Star-Journal and Peabody Gazette-Bulletin. Meyer said that subscriptions are still growing. Most new subscriptions are coming from far beyond this Kansas town. (Full disclosure: I recently subscribed to their electronic edition.)

In a strongly worded letter to Cody, which was also sent to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI), the Marion Record’s lawyer Bernie Rhodes stated “Your personal decision to treat the local newspaper as a drug cartel or a street gang offends the constitutional protections the founding fathers gave the free press,” also referencing the protections provided to journalists by the federal Privacy Protection Act.

When Cody handed Record reporter Deb Gruver a copy of the search warrant, she attempted to call her boss, editor and publisher Eric Meyer. Cody forcibly yanked her personal cell phone out of her hand, causing injury to one of her fingers, Gruver said, reporting the incident to the KBI.

The search warrant was issued without sufficient cause, and without prior review, according to a statement later made by the county attorney Joel Ensey. The judge issuing the warrant, Laura Viar,? has since stated that no probable cause affidavit was filed.

(Under current federal and state law, news organizations are supposed to receive subpoenas, not unsubstantiated search warrants, when official questions are being asked. Without proper court procedures and legal review, First Amendment rights can become vulnerable to intimidation tactics. Legal costs defending its rights can also deter news organizations from standing up to powerful enemies.)

Tension had been growing between the newspaper and the new police chief since his arrival earlier this summer. Cody was offended by the newspaper’s? efforts to discover more about his past service at the Kansas City (MO) police department, despite the decision by the publisher not to publish information that Cody had been disciplined for creating a hostile work environment and had resigned rather than accept a demotion. As the multiple sources had not been willing to go on the record with their information, Meyer said, he decided not to publish a story.?

Chief Cody had also ceased providing the weekly records of police reports that the Marion Record had regularly published for some six decades as soon as he took office, citing privacy concerns.

Meyer taught journalism at the University of Illinois and worked for years at The Milwaukee Journal. His family had bought the paper from the Hoch family when it seemed likely that the paper might be sold to a chain. He had returned to Marion to take over the family enterprise with the onset of COVID. His mother had continued to work at the paper one day a week, he has said.?

The Marion Record has a reputation as the watchdog for local government, with a staff of five full-timers and seven part-timers, considerably greater than other regional newspapers. A newspaper covering a Kansas community of similar size might employ three staffers, according to Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association. Limited internet access in some parts of the state (Kansas ranks 48th nationally in broadband coverage) has been a factor in keeping local readership above 82 percent, she stated in an interview with NPR.

The United States is losing newspapers at an alarming rate, according to a recent report by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, with more than a quarter vanishing since 2005. (The loss of revenue from advertising has been notable across journalism since the advent of the Internet.)The closures are expected to climb to a third of American newspapers by 2025. Additionally, when newspapers are acquired by corporate newspaper chains, local accountability? is reduced as the chains change their publishers and editors frequently, according to Penny Muse Abernathy, who wrote the report.

All seized equipment has now been returned after the Kansas Bureau of Investigation became involved but is being checked by a forensics expert and was not yet in use by the newspaper staff. Further legal action by the newspaper is expected.

“We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law,” Meyer said in an updated story from The Record. “We also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed.”

Despite the loss of its equipment, the newspaper published its next edition on time, with the headline: “Seized but Not Silenced.” Meyer has said he doesn’t want to lose focus on the next big story: the town budget.?

Its next edition is due out on Wednesday, August 23.

Back in 1976, investigative reporter Don Bolles was murdered in Arizona by criminals who wanted to keep him from continuing his investigation into their plans. In response, 24 news organizations reacted by sending a barrage of journalists to finish the job for the slain Bolles and as a warning that harming journalists is likely to cause more, not less, trouble for wrongdoers.

The police raid has certainly raised the profile of this small-town newspaper. Mrs. Meyer’s death has been the catalyst for an outpouring of support from individuals, newspapers, and journalism organizations. The US/Canada coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Katherine Jacobsen has been in Marion, helping to answer the innumerable phone calls, according to reporting by the Kansas Reflector (www.kansasreflector.com).

?The editor and publisher, as well as the staff of the Marion County Record, do not seem to have been intimidated by the police chief’s actions. Their lives, however, have probably changed forever. Perhaps Americans everywhere should also find consider the consequences of these events.

(Teri Sprackland is a graduate of the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism. She served an internship on the copy desk of the Kansas City Star and previously reported on commodities and crops for Kansas-based news services. She remembers fondly that the Chapman Advertiser would run an article whenever family came to visit her grandmother, Della Norman. )