Freedom demands eternal vigilance, and that is what the Marion County Record in Kansas was up to when the 4,000-circulation weekly newspaper north of Wichita was raided by local police Aug. 11. The government seized all the newspaper’s computers and servers, ripped cellphones from the hands of reporters and searched the publisher’s home, which may have caused the 98-year-old owner’s demise from the sheer shock of the police staging a direct assault on her First Amendment right to report and publish.
It’s part of a broad assault on a free press that is being waged across the country, including Iowa.
The Kansas story is complicated, as many small town stories are. The fuse was lit when a restaurant owner barred a reporter from covering a public meet-and-greet for Republican Congressman Jake Turner. The Record, of course, complained. It was reported that the newspaper had records about a drunk driving conviction for the restaurant owner, who was applying for a liquor license, and that it also was investigating the new police chief over heavy baggage from his last job. With assistance from the state crime bureau, local police obtained a search warrant for records related to the restaurant owner. As a bonus, police obtained other records of interest (such as allegations against the police chief that had not been published).
The restaurant owner claims that the Record got her liquor license background information illegally, suggesting her ex-husband may have played a role. The newspaper said it received information from a state database. The restaurant owner claimed a criminal invasion of privacy.
Federal shield laws allow police to search journalists when they believe a crime has been committed unrelated to their journalism. If the crime is related to reporting, the laws require authorities to serve a subpoena that can be challenged in court.
“You can’t say, ‘I’m allowed to raid the newsroom because I’m investigating a crime,’ if the crime you are investigating is journalism,” Freedom of the Press Foundation Advocacy Director Seth Stern explained in the New York Times.
The Record’s editor/publisher (and son of the owner who died after the raid) said he will file a federal lawsuit to protect his First Amendment rights to report on public matters.
It’s exceedingly rare for police to raid a newsroom. It was especially inadvisable since the Record had not published any allegations about the chief or the restaurant owner. The editor said he was not aware of any criminal actions in the reporting. For doing its work, its work was seized and shrouded.
This extreme incident was fostered in an atmosphere of contempt for facts and the messenger that smothers expression in the purported Land of the Free. Reporter Ty Rushing was barred from a Ron DeSantis event in Iowa. Donald Trump called a free press “enemy of the American people.” Gov. Kim Reynolds refuses to hold press conferences. Reporter Laura Belin is barred from the Iowa Capitol press corps. Reporters are banned from the historic press bench on the floor of the Iowa Senate. Repeated attempts are made to starve us of information by ceasing required public notices in newspapers. Politicians are now in the habit of filing frivolous libel suits against news organizations they don’t like, financed by dark money. DeSantis has tried to make it easier to sue reporters in Florida. The idea is to silence the voices.
It starts with burning books. Then you ban books. Then you declare lawyers and courts as corrupt. You gather funds to squelch independent voices. You claim crimes against the people. It’s Stalin redux. It is happening. Newspapers are dying like flies after the first frost. This is the most egregious example of a systematic closure of an honest and fair forum of debate. When police raid newspapers, it should light the fire of vigilance. Facts are the foundation of democracy. Newspapers are built on facts. If they can arrest you for that, who will risk telling you the truth? It puts a chill down our spine. We must remember what actually defines us as a free nation. It is the First Amendment. We must defend it with everything we can muster as a free people. It is a responsibility to the Founders that we must share. Tyranny takes root in darkness. That is an abiding truth.
Editor’s Note: On Aug. 16, Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey announced that, upon reviewing the warrant application used to search the newspaper, he had withdrawn the warrant used to search the newspaper office and other locations, as “insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.”
Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa. His book, “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper,” was recently released in paperback.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023
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