In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Here is the newspaper in question:
Marion County, Kansas is a small rural county with a population under 12,000.
I just thought this was weird. I guess it just shows the power of influential business people.
Big boss in small town using police as enforcers is a very old story. There are many, many fictional books, shows, and movies on this theme. Which is not to say it’s good, just to say it’s much more common than it ought to be.
The “good” news here is now the entire world knows about this and the newspaper ought to be able to get the Feds or at least state law enforcement in on the job to stomp out this corruption.
Update: My BFF and I chatted on Facebook last night, and I asked him about this. It was the first he’d heard of it, but now it gets a bit more interesting. His nephew is a police officer who lives in Marion, and they’ve been trying to recruit him. (He works in a nearby town; they live there because it’s halfway between his job, and his wife’s job.)
Granted, it utterly lacks the additional racial profiling, insults, and threats, but the whole “local government does what it wants and how DARE you report on it” feels perfectly in sync. It also continues an ongoing trend of politicians, local, state and federal, treating our excess of police and security forces as a private army. And the extremely limited pushback they get when they do so.
There are two sides to the story, sure. But the paper says that they were not looking to publish the private information.
The fact that the publisher is a retired University of Illinois J-school professor suggests (but hardly proves) that maybe they know something about journalistic ethics.
Also, looking at a few of other Marion County Record stories, it appears to me unusually strong by small town newspaper standards.
However, others here may not like their editorial stance, which is basically never-Trump Republican (in a very heavily GOP county).
What Kari Newell says about somebody using her personal information to access her private stuff is troubling. I am not at all convinced that it’s true, and I hope the newspaper is on the upside of this case. But there may be more than what we know, at this point.
Regardless of how this shakes out, raiding the home of a 98-year-old frail woman is a bunch of crap, and the judge and cops know that.
So it appears there’s still more to this story, as linked by Heather Cox Richardson in her column last night. The Marion Record was investigating Gideon Cody, the chief of police in Marion, after receiving several tips about alleged sexual misconduct charges at his former job.
35 news media and press freedom organizations write to condemn the raid:
On August 11, 2023, law enforcement officers with the Marion
Police Department executed a search warrant at the Marion County Record’s
newsroom and at its publisher’s home, and seized the Record’s electronic
newsgathering equipment, work product, and documentary material.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (the “Reporters
Committee”) and the undersigned 34 news media and press freedom
organizations write to condemn that raid. Newsroom searches and seizures
are among the most intrusive actions law enforcement can take with respect
to the free press, and the most potentially suppressive of free speech by the
press and the public.
Based on public reporting, the search warrant that has been published
online, and your public statements to the press, there appears to be no
justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search—particularly
when other investigative steps may have been available—and we are
concerned that it may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal,
state, and local law enforcement’s ability to conduct newsroom searches…
I don’t understand the need for such a large number of police. It seems like a couple detectives with a warrant could collect the evidence.
More information about the case will probably come out in the next few days.
Any sensitive data is probably backed up in the cloud and safe from a physical search by local cops. It will be more difficult to process a warrant against a cloud server company’s team of lawyers.
I saw a brief video of the raid last night during a report from a Wichita TV station. It looks to me that a detective was taking pictures of a cop picking up and carrying away a fairly large computer, which I assumed was the file server.
Now, who was taking this video is still in question.
That report is in this link. What I was describing is at about the 45 second mark.