EDITORIAL: What the authors of the First Amendment feared

The Marion County Record, a weekly newspaper in Kansas, received 2,000 new subscriptions last week. They came from people in many states as a demonstration of support for a newspaper that has become the symbol of the vulnerability of one of democracy’s most precious freedoms.

The Record’s new readers are representative of citizens across America who witnessed, as readers, viewers and listeners of news media reports, a chilling example of what the framers of the Constitution feared and moved them to guarantee freedom of the press in the First Amendment—a raid by agents of government intended to silence a newspaper.

On Aug. 11, a squad of police officers and sheriff’s deputies entered and searched the office of the Marion County Record and the home of the newspaper’s owner and editor. They seized computers, cell phones and reporting materials.

The raids were conducted under a warrant alleging the newspaper had illegally used personal information to verify a local business owner’s drunken-driving arrest, but the intent was clearly more than gathering evidence for what was later shown to be a meritless accusation of wrongdoing. By seizing the computer tools needed to produce journalism, law enforcement authorities acted to shut down the newspaper.

As reports of the raids drew national attention, the Record’s four-person newsroom worked day and night using borrowed and obsolete equipment to publish last week’s issue. It appeared with a front-page headline in two-inch-high type: “SEIZED . . . but not silenced.”

The Marion County attorney then announced there was “insufficient evidence” to justify the seizure and instructed police to return the confiscated computers, phones and records.

Though the Record is a small-town weekly that had a circulation of only 4,000 before the influx of supporting subscriptions, it should not be confused with what some community newspapers, mainly those with distant ownership by media chains, have become—businesses going through the motions of journalism printing news releases and legal notices. By all accounts, the Record and its staff of trained journalists give residents of the county they serve competently reported, in-depth news coverage.

The paper’s owner and editor, Eric Meyer, practiced his journalism skills as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for 20 years before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Illinois and later buying the Record. His tenure in Marion as editor has been marked by aggressive reporting on local government and editorials holding public officials accountable.

One of the subjects of the Record’s recent reporting was the city of Marion’s newly hired police chief, Gideon Cody, who directed the raid on the newspaper. The Record was investigating reports that Cody had left his previous position in the Kansas City Police Department under questionable circumstances. On social media, Cody had threatened to sue the newspaper if it wrote about him.

Freedom of the press is not something soft and fuzzy. In its proper exercise, it can antagonize the subjects of its mission. That mission is to provide information to citizens to ensure that the government they live with, and whose representatives they choose, is open and visible.

The world offers ample evidence of the bond between democracy and freedom of the press. Authoritative regimes universally shut down any semblance of a free press, often brutally. Democracies protect freedom of the press.

The heavy-handed attempt by authorities in a small town in Kansas to silence a newspaper is a reminder that protecting that freedom is an abiding responsibility.