Roughly 6 in 10 journalists in America are concerned about potential restrictions on press freedoms, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.
Who can blame them? The latest evidence: Last week’s shocking police raids of a small Kansas newspaper and the home of its owners are Exhibit A of why such fears exist. Those fears are made worse when the threat of book bans loom large and uncomfortable truths about our nation’s past are replaced by whitewashed lies.
Friday’s raids were prompted by the complaints of a local restaurateur who claimed that the Marion County Record illegally obtained information about the status of her driver’s license following her 2008 drunken driving conviction.
Not so, said publisher and co-owner, Eric Meyer, a former journalism instructor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Reporters, through the use of public records, were able to confirm what they were told about Kari Newell after receiving an unsolicited tip. No story came of it. What was published was an account of how Newell went off on the family-owned newspaper at a city council meeting, where she admitted she was convicted of a DUI and subsequently went behind the wheel after her license was suspended.
Newell, who previously kicked Meyer and one his reporters out of her business during an event for a local congressman, clearly has a beef with the Record.
But the newspaper has also apparently gotten under the skin of Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody as it pursued details about his career in Kansas City, Meyer has contended.
That a judge would sign off on a search warrant allowing the preposterous and possibly illegal raids exemplifies just how quickly the First Amendment rights of journalists can be trampled on.
“These are Hitler tactics,” Meyer’s mother and the Record’s co-owner, Joan Meyer, 98, reportedly said about the seizure of cellphones, computers and other materials by Cody’s entirefive-person force and a pair of sheriff’s deputies.
Joan Meyer, who was “stressed beyond her limits” and couldn’t eat or sleep, died less than 24 hours later. “Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner,” a headline of the Record’s lead story read on its website.
What has been unfolding in Marion doesn’t just affect the 1,900 people who live there. It is a threat to journalistic freedom and democracy everywhere else.
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