Raid on newspaper stymies a free press
The Marion County Record, a small Kansas newspaper, was raided by the county’s entire police force, which executed an illegal search warrant on its offices and the co-owners’ home and seized computers and other devices and records. The raid was ostensibly to investigate leaked information about local restaurateur Kari Newell’s DUI record, but it also later emerged that the paper had been investigating sexual harassment allegations against Police Chief Gideon Cody.
It’d be a mistake to consider this an isolated incident or some sort of anomaly not liable to be repeated. It is the depressingly foreseeable endpoint to a culture, pioneered by the extreme right and solidified by Donald Trump, to react to critical coverage with attacking rhetoric, hate mobs and, increasingly, the actual levers of police power.
Powerful public and private institutions have never been fully comfortable with the press’ fundamental role in safeguarding public accountability — the only profession specifically enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
Yet out-and-out attacks on the function and legitimacy of the press were mostly relegated to private remarks paired with public spin. Now, the calculus has changed. Companies, police departments and politicians care less and less about openly targeting reporters, or even see a benefit to calling them “enemies of the people.”
It might be jarring to the majority of the American public that rejects this ominous overreach, but it’s not unfamiliar. As Record co-owner Joan Meyer, mother of editor Eric Meyer, said after the raid, “these are Hitler tactics.” Unfortunately, the 98-year-old Joan won’t be around to keep up the commentary, because she died the next day.
The invocation of the top Nazi runs the risk of being dismissed as hyperbole, but let’s just be very clear that there really are no instances where armed agents of the state busting into a newspaper office and publisher’s home in what seems like a clear-cut attempt to disrupt legitimate coverage and uncover sources has ended with the perpetrators seen favorably.
This is one of the flashiest recent attacks on press freedoms, but the screw is turning all around.
Everyone has their complaints about the press, to be sure, but we guarantee you’d miss us if we were gone.