Small-town newspapers are vanishing from the American landscapejili jackpot, crushed by economic pressures from online media and corporate consolidation. In some cases, governments have piled on, seeking to sink or undermine the papers that remain. Those papers should be able to rely on courts to protect them from government abuses. Too often, however, courts fail to do their job.
Marion, Kan., provides a vivid, troubling example. On Aug. 11, the police in that central Kansas town of 2,000 brazenly raided the office of the weekly Marion County Record and the home of its publisher. Officers seized reporters’ computers, phones and other materials.
The Marion police said the raid was necessary to an ongoing investigation. That inquiry reportedly concerned a local restaurant owner’s claim that the Record, while reporting about her application for a liquor license, had broken the law to obtain information about her past drunk-driving offense. Magistrate Judge Laura Viar’s sweeping warrant cited “identity theft” and “unlawful acts concerning computers” as grounds for the raid.
The Record’s publisher, Eric Meyer, told NPR that the paper had also been digging into allegations of past misconduct by Marion’s police chief, Gideon Cody, who took office on June 1 after retiring from the Kansas City Police Department. Mr. Meyer says Mr. Cody had threatened to sue the paper.
On Wednesday, following widespread condemnation of the raid, Joel Ensey, the Marion County attorney, essentially threw Judge Viar under the bus. Mr. Ensey issued a statement saying that “insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.” He asked the court to issue an order releasing the seized materials.
A government raid on a newspaper’s office and its publisher’s home, with police seizing reporters’ computers and phones, sounds like a lurid tale from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This may have been an extreme case, but the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents dozens of government (as well as private) offenses against American journalists every year — not just searches and seizures but also arrests, physical assaults by the police, prior restraints, intimidation and improper denials of access to locations and information. All of this can add up to big legal fees for newspapers struggling to survive.
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