Marion, Kan., became the epicenter of an assault on our constitutional protections and the scene of an undemocratic power grab as well as a showcase for public officials striving to reach the heights of political malfeasance and professional stupidity on Friday, Aug. 11.
Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody and his five-officer police force in the prairie town of 1,902 people raided the Marion County Record newsroom and the home of editor Eric Meyer, seizing computers and cell phones belonging to Meyer and his reporters.
The stress of the home raid led to Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who was also the paper’s co-owner and lived with her son, dying over the weekend.
Cody apparently alleged that the newspaper had confidential information that a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who had been convicted of DUI, was driving around town illegally.
What makes this altogether tragic and ironic is that the newspaper never published such details about Newell and instead was quoting what Newell herself stated during a public town council meeting in front of her community.
The small-town newspaper, exercising its own discretion, put on hold reporting on the details because it did not trust the source, allegedly Newell’s husband, as they were in the middle of a nasty divorce. This is the kind of ethical question we at newspapers handle all the time: Deciding whether or not a source is legitimate, whether the information is sincere and legal and whether or not we have an ethical obligation to print it or not. But if someone declares private information at a public meeting or that they’re breaking the law, the debate is moot — the subject made their crime public on their own.
In response to this small-town drama, Cody went out and got a search warrant for a raid. However, journalists and their newsgathering materials are protected by federal law [Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. §2000aa to 2000aa-12] from search and seizure without a court order and a public hearing , and Cody did not get a court-ordered subpoena, just a plain search warrant. He claimed he provided the magistrate with an affidavit to justify his raid but the court told media outlets they had no such affidavit on record.
Meyer told the Associated Press that Cody might also have been fearful that the Marion County Record was investigating Cody’s years with the police department in Kansas City, Mo., prior to being hired by Marion in April.
Maybe Cody never heard the saying, “It’s never the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup.” If he thought this would silence the paper, he clearly has another thing coming. The adage “Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton” could never be more apropos, with the addition “nor his friends.”
News outlets may spar for scoops, but an attack on the First Amendment prompts a unified response from us all, not unlike NATO’s Article 5. The news story has spread to publications from Paris to Tokyo, from Johannesburg to Mexico City, as news outlets around the world fervently report the details and opine on what the affair means for American democracy and freedom of the press.
It takes a special kind of stupid to unite RedState, The Washington Times and the New York Post with Mother Jones, Alternet and the Huffington Post in condemnation of one’s actions, but Cody has brilliantly succeeded in doing so. This story — as well as Cody’s illegal actions and Newell’s DUI — has now been Streisand-effected into international ignominy.
American journalists have a civilly-sacred obligation to investigate, discover facts, challenge official statements, reveal public documents and present all those details to the public at large, boldly, fearlessly and unrelentingly.
Journalists around the world, reporting from war zones, under dictatorial and totalitarian governments, in third-world countries and standing up to despotic regimes under the threat of violence or assassination or murder to investigate corruption, state-sanctioned violence, repression, genocide, warmongering and civil oppression look to the United States, our institutions and our First Amendment to see how the media should be protected by the state and its appointed and elected government officials.
American “soft power” is not just pop culture, consumer goods and cash but the example our government sets about the institutions that allow our civil society to function.
Foreigners see how our national and local governments respect journalists and most especially the journalists who criticize them and demand the same respect for pursuit of the truth from their own governments.
We’ve had our arguments with local officials in the Verde Valley over the decades, but I can’t name one who would dare a dumb, career-ending stunt like this.
We hope and trust that the Kansas legal system comes down harshly on this buffoonish cartoon character of a police chief and his illegal activities to provide a warning to any official in Kansas or the country who thinks the freedom of the press as enshrined in the First Amendment is not wholly sacrosanct.
While it’s too late for Joan Meyer to find justice, it’s never too late for her paper or her community. We look forward to the follow-up news stories on the investigation that will be published in the Marion County Record.
Now the whole world will be reading it, too.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
