Eric Meyer, publisher of the Marion County Record, answers questions in his newspaper office Friday after police seized computers, servers, cellphones and other items. He says he doesn’t know how they will get the newspaper out on Tuesday, but, “We will publish something.” (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid. Read more here
It is not hyperbole to say that this attack on the people’s right to know appears to have killed the Marion County Record’s Joan Meyer. From Melinda Henneberger: https://t.co/EqU8bElgLo
Back in the 1990s, on my very first day at my very first newspaper job, my boss — a sometimes-crusty, often-jolly Battle of the Bulge veteran by the name of Bill Meyer — told me to call up a local businessman who was, rumor had it, about to open a new branch of a popular chain restaurant in our small central Kansas town.
“Ask him when it’s going to open,” Bill told me. “And ask him if he’s going to serve beer.”
It wasn’t an idle question. The businessman owned another restaurant from the same franchise the next town over, in a small Mennonite community, and certainly no beer was served there.
So I did what I was told. I called the businessman. I asked him about his new restaurant. And, finally — not thinking much of it — asked him the final question: Would the new establishment serve beer?
There was a long silence on the phone.
“What kind of reporter are you anyway?” he sputtered. “What do you think you’re doing asking questions like that?” If memory serves, he then hung up on me. It was an unexpectedly fractious start to my journalism career.
The paper where I had just started? The Marion County Record.
You’ve probably heard of the newspaper by now. It was raided Friday by the Marion police, many of its computers and all the other stuff its staff uses to, well, put out the newspaper, were hauled away with no guarantee of their quick or safe return.
“We’re going to have to reinvent the wheel to put out this week’s paper,” Eric Meyer, Bill’s son, told me on Friday after news of the raid became public and very quickly went viral nationally.
We’re not entirely sure of the reasons behind the raid. Marion’s police chief wasn’t taking questions, at least initially. But the apparent cause — unsurprisingly to me, given my own first-day memories of the paper — had something to do with the paper’s unpublished investigation of a liquor license for a catering business.
The mixture of alcohol, business and journalism in Marion has always been touchy, apparently.
Since we don’t know the full details behind the raid, though, I’m not going to get into all the nitty-gritty. Bill, who died in 2006, wouldn’t want me to write without having a firm command of all the facts.
But it’s scary when police raid a newspaper. It looks and smells like a threat to the First Amendment. Investigators had better have a damned good — even extraordinary — justification for the search warrant. God help them otherwise.
I do want you to know about the Marion County Record, though.
It’s one of those small town newspapers that serves as both the backbone of its community, and of the journalism profession at large. I wasn’t the only young reporter to get my start there: Bill — a member of the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame and a KU alum who had the Jayhawk fight song played at his funeral — regularly hosted summer interns from the university, sending them back out into the world after a few months of doing everything: Taking pictures, writing features, covering city council meetings, you name it. It was an immersive education.
Sometimes, the paper threw elbows. Bill once told me about coming into work to find a bullet hole in his office window.
Small town journalism is a delicate balance, though. Everybody knows everybody. You can’t hide from the people you write about. When the paper ran a rather prominent correction about an error I’d made, I was razzed on the streets of Marion for a solid week.
A few years before he passed, Bill called me to talk about maybe coming back to town. It’s a nice community, he told me, a place where you can serve that community and make a comfortable living.
He loved the town. And he loved the newspaper. Rural Kansas and community journalism both face brisk headwinds these days. The two situations are probably related. Whatever the outcome of this ugly mess, Marion and its newspaper will still need each other to survive.
===========
I think the best thing we can do to help this small paper get through this is to subscribe (here).
Personally, I think Police Chief Gideon Cody, Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, and drunk driver Kari Newell are about to go through some things.
(note: the dying bird is randomly NOT supplying the full tweet, so you may have to click through to see images. Apologies).
Thank you for frontpaging this. I first saw it last night and hoped someone would highlight it. It’s horrific. I’m so outraged by what they did to the publisher’s mother. Just appalling. And more than that, the attack on journalists is terrifying.
JFC. In a just world, the cops and everyone else responsible would be prosecuted for that woman’s death. But since it’s not possible to definitively prove that what they did led to it, they’ll get away with it. This whole story is really horrifying. The FREE SPEECH crowd sure loves to forget about it when it comes to people speeching things they don’t like.
@Yarrow: I could not stop thinking about it after I read it last night and subscribed to the paper right away. I’m hoping they come to work on Monday to find thousands of new subscribers.
4.
JMG
Horribly sad but true is that the death of this innocent old woman will be the spur that sends national media bigfeet out to Kansas, will lead to many uncomfortable questions for the governor of the state (a Democrat, I believe) and most of all, will introduce Marion County to a number of polite, conservatively dressed men and women who say hello by flashing their FBI credentials.
5.
Yarrow
Btw, in addition to rallying around the Marion County paper, please also support the Kansas Reflector, which is doing yeoman work amplifying stories like this one https://t.co/9zIEA6U4cL— Laura Lorson (@prairielaura) August 12, 2023
If you click through there’s an embedded tweet for the Kansas Reflector.
6.
Rusty
Elsewhere it’s been reported that the court doesn’t even have on file the supposed affidavits used to justify the raids. The whole thing stinks from the judge on down. Hopefully the federal system steps in.
7.
Yarrow
@TaMara: I couldn’t either. It kept me up last night. I was so horrified by it. It’s so awful and terrifying.
8.
BeautifulPlumage
@Yarrow: came here to say this too. Thanks, Tamara.
9.
Anoniminous
I find it hysterically funny white people are always amazed and outraged to discover the police and courts in the US are corrupt to the core.
10.
Yarrow
I just Googled Marion County Record and see there are stories about it on CNN, The Guardian, USA Today, The Daily Beast, The New York Post, and that’s just what showed up in the thumbnails for “News.” Maybe it’ll get some national attention. The death of a 98 year old woman as a result of her home being searched is a good hook for the story. Sadly.
11.
trollhattan
Where’s Marion? Kansas?
Sam Brownback’s idea of “almost heaven.”
Nice little Gestapo you’ve got there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
When folks dismiss the notion of state and local po-lice tracking girls and women traveling out of state for abortions (or other hanky panky they might disapprove of) they should ponder what they’re doing already.
@Anoniminous: I don’t think there’s anything naive about being outraged. To get to a point of such cynicism as to NOT be outraged by things like this would be far worse. And for me personally, I’m not amazed by it, I’m disgusted and contemptuous. There’s a difference.
13.
Mike R
@Anoniminous: Agree completely and in addition am completely puzzled by white people who grew up poor, who seem to be totally oblivious to these facts.
14.
Yarrow
@Anoniminous: Who said anyone was amazed? It’s outrageous and people are rightly outraged. It’s also not just about white people. It’s an attack by the court and law enforcement on the press. That’s not okay.
That chilling police raid against a newsroom in Kansas was signed off on by a local judge, LauraViar. Importantly: My understanding is that she will face a retention election in 2024.
16.
Nelle
Marion County is where my maternal great-grandparents settled in the 1870s, when they left Russia (now Ukraine). It’s also where Timothy McVeigh stored his bomb stuff in an abandoned old schoolhouse, which happened to be the one room school that my mother attended. I went to the Memnonite College ten miles to the east. Familiar ground, for sure.
17.
RedDirtGirl
I just subscribed.
18.
Nelle
@RaflW: I hope she has to campaign from jail. I hope another 2024 candidate is in the same situation.
Police defend raid on Kansas newspaper amid backlash over ‘brazen violation of press freedom’
The newspaper intends to sue.
22.
artem1s
only Police Chief Gideon Cody could answer questions for this story,
The office of Attorney General Kris Kobach wasn’t available to comment on the legal controversy
Melissa Underwood, communications director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation,“At the request of the Marion Police Department, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, we began an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing in Marion, Kansas. The investigation is ongoing,” Underwood said.
That’s a lot of high powered people who have decided to intervene on behalf of Newell. And over information that is already easily found on public websites. Seems like this might be about more than whether she gets a liquor license. Evidently the ex-husband/informant has something on her she and others don’t want to become public knowledge. I smell fear, bribery, and/or money laundering. Now they get the whole country wading to find out – how does if feel to reap FA whirlwind dumbasses?.
I want the DOJ and the FBI on their doorstep on Monday morning at 9 am.
24.
RaflW
A few demographics for Marion County, KS which includes and surrounds the town of Marion. The county shrank by 6.6% from 2010 to 2020. So maybe people are voting with their feet about what sort of place it really is. It is also, very unsurprisingly, 94.9% white.
@artem1s: Kris Kobach I am unfortunately very confident will not want to investigate any sort of wrongdoing by cops or rogue magistrates. He’s an open and proud election manipulator and far more corrupt and corruptible than even the average Republican elected official.
We need DoJ to get on this. ASAP.
27.
artem1s
@WaterGirl: FBI can’t intervene unless local LEO asks them or unless the crimes involved investigations in multiple states. The state AG should be the one to act and/or invite the Feds in. Seems like the ball is in their or the Governors court right now.
It’s funny how some think they can bury bad actions of the powerful. I wish I could say it’s only a small town thing but Republican party hierarchy (& their donors) have pulled the same thing everywhere. The mindset of those thinking they can get away with it galls me. What the hell are they thinking? They’re manifesting the infinite ego’s of their own minds.
30.
Donatellonerd
@artem1s: DOJ could investigate for violating the statute requiring subpoenas and not raids of newspaper offices, non? and the fbi does that.
31.
MomSense
Thank you for front paging this story. I read it on Heather Cox Richardson’s dispatch and was horrified.
32.
LAO
Finally, an actual 1st amendment violation rather than the bs pushed by the right wing.
if I sound gleeful, I’m not. I’m just sick and tired of the dumbing down of our society by a bunch of whining right wingers.
This story is appalling, the actions of the police and judge are disgusting. I also look forward to nothing actually happening to fix it because the right wing doesn’t not care about rights, if those rights can’t be used as a weapon against their enemies, real or imagined.
33.
Lethe
Subscribed. Made some calls to IT friends about eq donations.
34.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Subscribed. BJ is a force for good.
35.
Geminid
Turkish journalist Ragip Soylu reported this story last night, and linked to the Kansas Reflector article. Mr. Soylu (@ragipsoylu) generally concentrates on Turkish and Middle Eastern matters, but this story got his attention. Soylu is Turkiye bureau chief for London-based Middle East Eye.
36.
Kelly
Sorta related. Some eastern Oregon small town big shots tried to get the Malheur County sheriff to go after the local paper. They claimed reporter’s calls and emails were illegal harassment. He didn’t. The situation got some national attention. Malheur County is where the Bundy wildlife refuge standoff happened. Malheur Enterprise publisher and editor Les Zaitz is a bulldog. Small town big shots work on being the dictators of they’re little patch and plenty of small town assholes back them up.
@RaflW: I grabbed the link from Mastodon last night and popped it into the overnight thread. I don’t suspect that this links up to the Governors position, this looks like good old fashioned local grift, where the local money has bought the necessary positions to ensure their bubble of security.
The lack of bread crumbs is gonna come back to haunt them as far as no corresponding justification for their actions.
Has there been a GoFundMe started to cover their legal fees?
40.
PJ
@Yarrow:
Even if it weren’t an attack on the press, it seems like a clear civil rights violation and abuse of police and judicial power.
And, yeah, no one’s “amazed” – they are appropriately outraged. To act like this is not worthy of comment is cynical and contemptuous of human rights and life.
@Nukular Biskits: Agreed. I’ve been saying for awhile now that if an American oligarch actually wanted to do some good they’d invest a lot of money into local newspapers. They don’t; they won’t.
43.
Geminid
@Donatellonerd: Seems to me that the Justice Department could possibly prosecute the bad actors here under the Civil Rights Act language regarding the deprivation of civil rights under color of law. Maybe someone more knowledgeable will comment on this (or maybe has).
44.
Kathleen
@MomSense: Here’s a link to the Dr. Cox Richardson’s Substack:
Sorta related. Some eastern Oregon small town big shots tried to get the Malheur County sheriff to go after the local paper. They claimed reporter’s calls and emails were illegal harassment. He didn’t.
This feeds into an observation I was just about to add: If the country and the national media don’t come down, HARD, on this police department and magistrate, then wingnut judges, small town cops, and local politicos will soon be declaring open season on any local journalism outlets they don’t like, for even the mildest criticism.
The Kansas state government, the Feds, and the national media need to go into full gear on this, and make an example of the people involved – and I hope to the FSM that they do.
The seizure is just insane. The warrant apparently says there’s evidence of “identity theft” and lets them take any equipment that could have been used for that purpose, meaning any electronics short of a TV set.
Has there been a GoFundMe started to cover their legal fees?
The Marion County Record is saying they don’t need the money right now, but I’m not sure it’s sunk into them what kind of precedent this is going to serve as for the right-wing authoritarians in this country.
If it’s not nipped in the bud, the Marion Country Record could become to right-wing authoritarian police raids on anodyne citizen participation, as Columbine became to school shootings.
You can bet the Fox News crowd is going to be salivating at the thought of getting away with this kind of authoritarian vengeance – you can already see the lust for it in the upswing in Swatting over the past couple decades.
52.
Villago Delenda Est
Naked, unrepentant fascism.
53.
Andrya
@artem1s: I am absolutely not a lawyer, but are you saying that the FBI/DOJ cannot be involved even if federal law is broken? I’m thinking of the cases under Jim Crow where local law enforcement was on the side of lynch law, but there was (sometimes) a federal prosecution for “conspiracy to violate civil rights”. This happened (very inadequately) in the case of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964. Also, aren’t bank robbers routinely prosecuted in federal court, even if the robbery is in just one state?
And it seems quite likely that this was a violation of federal law.
Swatting is politics agnostic. It’s cranking someone in a game stream, there are no politics involved at all. This wasn’t a swatting.
There’s a thing about older liberals who won’t let go of the 60’s and 70’s and keep trying to apply modern social items like swatting, or fafo, to their pet causes that truly drives young people off. It’s our shit, you can talk about old stuff we all hate, stay off our lawn!
55.
matt
Letting people see anything other than Nazi news violates the free speech rights of conservatives.
Yeah, the first few incidents were gamers calling in emergency services (usually a hostage claim, sometimes a violent suicide claim) on an opponent but it quickly escalated out of the gaming only realms.
It’s still calling emergency services to respond violently to someone else’s location, but there are instructions tools out there such that you no longer need a hacker to phreak or active spoof the id.
57.
laura
@Villago Delenda Est: short, sharp and to the point. Unaccountable power guarantees abuse of power. Local news is vital for informed citizenry and self governing so no wonder we find gross abuses of state power in service to corruption and can only speculate about what doesn’t get reported. Infotainment is killing us.
58.
Skepticat
My old, largely unused journalism degree has prodded me to (a) scream wildly at the laptop and (b) subscribe to the newspaper. Neither has really helped my sense of outrage or a frisson of fear about further atrocities.
59.
bbleh
“Police Chief Gideon Cody refused to comment on the raid or what led to it, saying only that he was disappointed that the article failed to note the department’s sharp new uniforms, including epaulettes, jackboots, and armbands of his own design.”
60.
Shalimar
@eversor: Swatting is not politics agnostic. Yes, it started in gaming culture and still exists there. But a lot of the racist misogynistic pricks who began as young asshole gamers have graduated in the last 15 years to Republican politics. Swatting happens all the time for political reasons, and 90%+ is from the rightwing.
This is why we do not assign individual citizens the obligation to don their AR-15s and stand in defense of the newspaper office. It’s not your JOB to personally defend the newspaper. You delegate that to an authority. If a small town police department runs amok in this way, you bunker down and call in the feds. And rightly so.
62.
Embra
Subscribed (Thanks so much for the suggestion, I was wondering how to get some tangible support to them.)
63.
Mai Naem mobileI
The congressman that represents the area Jake LaTurner has yet to make a statement. Remember it was at his meeting that the newspaper reporter got kicked out. I found it interesting that Kari Newell’s DUI was from 2008. I would like to know what kind of DUI it was. Was it some extreme DUI that involved somebody getting injured or was it more of a regular DUI which she just hadn’t taken care of due to financial reasons?
As a reporter for another little paper which has had its clashes with county officials in a ruby-red county – clashes that led to a First Amendment violation case where we won damages against them – I am following this story very closely. And sent the Kansas Reflector article off to my publisher posthaste after Yarrow posted it – yesterday? Day before?
Off-site cloud storage for *all* our files is coming.
btw…if anyone is feeling like expanding their “small, independent newspapers struggling in rural areas”?…please consider subscribing/contributing to either of the journals I write for (shameless bleg, I know, but despite my contributions they both do some damn fine work!): The Wet Mountain Tribune or the Ark Valley Voice.
The Tribune comes in both paper and e-editions; AVV is online only.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that after seeing this Kansas example, I can see the same thing happening to one or both if we pissed off the wrong people with our investigative reporting. The Trib been losing advertising because of the relentless smear campaigns conducted by the right-wing rag in town.
Just a thought, if y’all are feeling generous towards small-town journalism.
68.
dimmsdale
@Miss Bianca: You write for the Ark Valley Voice?! I subscribed to it when Adam Silverman started writing a security column there (presumably not the only BJ regular who’s done so), and it’s one of the online subscriptions I’ve kept up with, as the paper has gone thru management changes and conversion to nonprofit ownership. Thanks for fighting the good fight!
69.
dimmsdale
@dimmsdale: ETA, I don’t believe Adam is doing his security column for them anymore….something has come along that seems to occupy a good bit of his time lately (understatement of the year) the results of which are available on this very website every night.
Word is that they took his mother’s router. Her fucking router! WTF that has to do with identity theft is beyond me. It seems that it was done just to be assholes and flex on the old lady. It sounds like her son set her house up so it was digitally assistive to her and they took it all down, leaving her with nothing.
The whole story is nuts and these cold fucks are just cruel.
72.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shalimar: Some swatting is false flag swatting, to djin up sympathy for such scumbags as MTG.
I’ll second Ms. Bianca’s call here. local Advertising is the lifeblood of small town newspapers, but even a couple hundred subscriptions can make a huge difference in generating enough money to make some critical capital investments (say cloud storage) or hiring an extra part time reporter.
I ran a weekly in rural upstate New York for three years with a circulation of about 1700. Incredibly satisfying and important job, but some one with deep pockets and a bone to pick could have crushed us easily.
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Yarrow
Thank you for frontpaging this. I first saw it last night and hoped someone would highlight it. It’s horrific. I’m so outraged by what they did to the publisher’s mother. Just appalling. And more than that, the attack on journalists is terrifying.
Alison Rose
JFC. In a just world, the cops and everyone else responsible would be prosecuted for that woman’s death. But since it’s not possible to definitively prove that what they did led to it, they’ll get away with it. This whole story is really horrifying. The FREE SPEECH crowd sure loves to forget about it when it comes to people speeching things they don’t like.
TaMara
@Yarrow: I could not stop thinking about it after I read it last night and subscribed to the paper right away. I’m hoping they come to work on Monday to find thousands of new subscribers.
JMG
Horribly sad but true is that the death of this innocent old woman will be the spur that sends national media bigfeet out to Kansas, will lead to many uncomfortable questions for the governor of the state (a Democrat, I believe) and most of all, will introduce Marion County to a number of polite, conservatively dressed men and women who say hello by flashing their FBI credentials.
Yarrow
If you click through there’s an embedded tweet for the Kansas Reflector.
Rusty
Elsewhere it’s been reported that the court doesn’t even have on file the supposed affidavits used to justify the raids. The whole thing stinks from the judge on down. Hopefully the federal system steps in.
Yarrow
@TaMara: I couldn’t either. It kept me up last night. I was so horrified by it. It’s so awful and terrifying.
BeautifulPlumage
@Yarrow: came here to say this too. Thanks, Tamara.
Anoniminous
I find it hysterically funny white people are always amazed and outraged to discover the police and courts in the US are corrupt to the core.
Yarrow
I just Googled Marion County Record and see there are stories about it on CNN, The Guardian, USA Today, The Daily Beast, The New York Post, and that’s just what showed up in the thumbnails for “News.” Maybe it’ll get some national attention. The death of a 98 year old woman as a result of her home being searched is a good hook for the story. Sadly.
trollhattan
Where’s Marion? Kansas?
Sam Brownback’s idea of “almost heaven.”
Nice little Gestapo you’ve got there, be a shame if anything happened to it.
When folks dismiss the notion of state and local po-lice tracking girls and women traveling out of state for abortions (or other hanky panky they might disapprove of) they should ponder what they’re doing already.
Alison Rose
@Anoniminous: I don’t think there’s anything naive about being outraged. To get to a point of such cynicism as to NOT be outraged by things like this would be far worse. And for me personally, I’m not amazed by it, I’m disgusted and contemptuous. There’s a difference.
Mike R
@Anoniminous: Agree completely and in addition am completely puzzled by white people who grew up poor, who seem to be totally oblivious to these facts.
Yarrow
@Anoniminous: Who said anyone was amazed? It’s outrageous and people are rightly outraged. It’s also not just about white people. It’s an attack by the court and law enforcement on the press. That’s not okay.
RaflW
Via Daniel Nichanian:
@Taniel · 17h
That chilling police raid against a newsroom in Kansas was signed off on by a local judge, Laura Viar. Importantly: My understanding is that she will face a retention election in 2024.
Nelle
Marion County is where my maternal great-grandparents settled in the 1870s, when they left Russia (now Ukraine). It’s also where Timothy McVeigh stored his bomb stuff in an abandoned old schoolhouse, which happened to be the one room school that my mother attended. I went to the Memnonite College ten miles to the east. Familiar ground, for sure.
RedDirtGirl
I just subscribed.
Nelle
@RaflW: I hope she has to campaign from jail. I hope another 2024 candidate is in the same situation.
WaterGirl
If 200 of us subscribe at the $34.99 level (internet access only) that would put $7,000 in their hands right away.
if you subscribe, maybe mention it here so we can collectively see how much difference we can make together?
Personally, I’m in.
dm
Someone is about to have an object lesson in the Streisand Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Baud
This looks like a follow up story.
The newspaper intends to sue.
artem1s
That’s a lot of high powered people who have decided to intervene on behalf of Newell. And over information that is already easily found on public websites. Seems like this might be about more than whether she gets a liquor license. Evidently the ex-husband/informant has something on her she and others don’t want to become public knowledge. I smell fear, bribery, and/or money laundering. Now they get the whole country wading to find out – how does if feel to reap FA whirlwind dumbasses?.
WaterGirl
I want the DOJ and the FBI on their doorstep on Monday morning at 9 am.
RaflW
A few demographics for Marion County, KS which includes and surrounds the town of Marion. The county shrank by 6.6% from 2010 to 2020. So maybe people are voting with their feet about what sort of place it really is. It is also, very unsurprisingly, 94.9% white.
Alison Rose
@WaterGirl: SAME.
RaflW
@artem1s: Kris Kobach I am unfortunately very confident will not want to investigate any sort of wrongdoing by cops or rogue magistrates. He’s an open and proud election manipulator and far more corrupt and corruptible than even the average Republican elected official.
We need DoJ to get on this. ASAP.
artem1s
@WaterGirl: FBI can’t intervene unless local LEO asks them or unless the crimes involved investigations in multiple states. The state AG should be the one to act and/or invite the Feds in. Seems like the ball is in their or the Governors court right now.
Donatellonerd
he says in an interview with the Kansas Register that he’s already gotten tons of subscriptions and doesn’t really need money at the moment. Also that they’ve also been doing an investigation of the new police chief, whom they’ve had tons of anonymous tips about. but the astonishing thing to me is: he never published anything about either of them so far…didn’t trust stuff from her ex-husband. https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/11/police-stage-chilling-raid-on-marion-county-newspaper-seizing-computers-records-and-cellphones/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
kindness
It’s funny how some think they can bury bad actions of the powerful. I wish I could say it’s only a small town thing but Republican party hierarchy (& their donors) have pulled the same thing everywhere. The mindset of those thinking they can get away with it galls me. What the hell are they thinking? They’re manifesting the infinite ego’s of their own minds.
Donatellonerd
@artem1s: DOJ could investigate for violating the statute requiring subpoenas and not raids of newspaper offices, non? and the fbi does that.
MomSense
Thank you for front paging this story. I read it on Heather Cox Richardson’s dispatch and was horrified.
LAO
Finally, an actual 1st amendment violation rather than the bs pushed by the right wing.
if I sound gleeful, I’m not. I’m just sick and tired of the dumbing down of our society by a bunch of whining right wingers.
This story is appalling, the actions of the police and judge are disgusting. I also look forward to nothing actually happening to fix it because the right wing doesn’t not care about rights, if those rights can’t be used as a weapon against their enemies, real or imagined.
Lethe
Subscribed. Made some calls to IT friends about eq donations.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Subscribed. BJ is a force for good.
Geminid
Turkish journalist Ragip Soylu reported this story last night, and linked to the Kansas Reflector article. Mr. Soylu (@ragipsoylu) generally concentrates on Turkish and Middle Eastern matters, but this story got his attention. Soylu is Turkiye bureau chief for London-based Middle East Eye.
Kelly
Sorta related. Some eastern Oregon small town big shots tried to get the Malheur County sheriff to go after the local paper. They claimed reporter’s calls and emails were illegal harassment. He didn’t. The situation got some national attention. Malheur County is where the Bundy wildlife refuge standoff happened. Malheur Enterprise publisher and editor Les Zaitz is a bulldog. Small town big shots work on being the dictators of they’re little patch and plenty of small town assholes back them up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/20/malheur-enterprise-greg-smith-oregon-investigation/
piratedan
@RaflW: I grabbed the link from Mastodon last night and popped it into the overnight thread. I don’t suspect that this links up to the Governors position, this looks like good old fashioned local grift, where the local money has bought the necessary positions to ensure their bubble of security.
The lack of bread crumbs is gonna come back to haunt them as far as no corresponding justification for their actions.
Nukular Biskits
IMHO, all local press should be patronized. If I may, I’d like to also recommend the Mississippi Free Press, another great LOCAL journalism outlet.
Twitter: @MSFreePress
Website: MS Free Press
Renie
Has there been a GoFundMe started to cover their legal fees?
PJ
@Yarrow:
Even if it weren’t an attack on the press, it seems like a clear civil rights violation and abuse of police and judicial power.
And, yeah, no one’s “amazed” – they are appropriately outraged. To act like this is not worthy of comment is cynical and contemptuous of human rights and life.
munira
@WaterGirl: Ok I just subscribed.
Yarrow
@Nukular Biskits: Agreed. I’ve been saying for awhile now that if an American oligarch actually wanted to do some good they’d invest a lot of money into local newspapers. They don’t; they won’t.
Geminid
@Donatellonerd: Seems to me that the Justice Department could possibly prosecute the bad actors here under the Civil Rights Act language regarding the deprivation of civil rights under color of law. Maybe someone more knowledgeable will comment on this (or maybe has).
Kathleen
@MomSense: Here’s a link to the Dr. Cox Richardson’s Substack:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-12-2023
There’s no paywall.
WaterGirl
@munira: thank you!
Nelle
@Kelly: AND then they show up on Congress. Kari Newell reminds me of Lauren Bobert.
eclare
@Nukular Biskits:
Following on the bird, thanks.
Renie
Here’s the link to subscribe. You can subscribe for on-line only.
https://marionrecord.com/credit/subscription:MARION+COUNTY+RECORD
Lacuna Synecdoche
Kelly:
This feeds into an observation I was just about to add: If the country and the national media don’t come down, HARD, on this police department and magistrate, then wingnut judges, small town cops, and local politicos will soon be declaring open season on any local journalism outlets they don’t like, for even the mildest criticism.
The Kansas state government, the Feds, and the national media need to go into full gear on this, and make an example of the people involved – and I hope to the FSM that they do.
Redshift
The seizure is just insane. The warrant apparently says there’s evidence of “identity theft” and lets them take any equipment that could have been used for that purpose, meaning any electronics short of a TV set.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Renie:
The Marion County Record is saying they don’t need the money right now, but I’m not sure it’s sunk into them what kind of precedent this is going to serve as for the right-wing authoritarians in this country.
If it’s not nipped in the bud, the Marion Country Record could become to right-wing authoritarian police raids on anodyne citizen participation, as Columbine became to school shootings.
You can bet the Fox News crowd is going to be salivating at the thought of getting away with this kind of authoritarian vengeance – you can already see the lust for it in the upswing in Swatting over the past couple decades.
Villago Delenda Est
Naked, unrepentant fascism.
Andrya
@artem1s: I am absolutely not a lawyer, but are you saying that the FBI/DOJ cannot be involved even if federal law is broken? I’m thinking of the cases under Jim Crow where local law enforcement was on the side of lynch law, but there was (sometimes) a federal prosecution for “conspiracy to violate civil rights”. This happened (very inadequately) in the case of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964. Also, aren’t bank robbers routinely prosecuted in federal court, even if the robbery is in just one state?
And it seems quite likely that this was a violation of federal law.
eversor
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Swatting is politics agnostic. It’s cranking someone in a game stream, there are no politics involved at all. This wasn’t a swatting.
There’s a thing about older liberals who won’t let go of the 60’s and 70’s and keep trying to apply modern social items like swatting, or fafo, to their pet causes that truly drives young people off. It’s our shit, you can talk about old stuff we all hate, stay off our lawn!
matt
Letting people see anything other than Nazi news violates the free speech rights of conservatives.
Kirk
@eversor: Sorry, not a trademarked term.
Yeah, the first few incidents were gamers calling in emergency services (usually a hostage claim, sometimes a violent suicide claim) on an opponent but it quickly escalated out of the gaming only realms.
It’s still calling emergency services to respond violently to someone else’s location, but there are instructions tools out there such that you no longer need a hacker to phreak or active spoof the id.
laura
@Villago Delenda Est: short, sharp and to the point. Unaccountable power guarantees abuse of power. Local news is vital for informed citizenry and self governing so no wonder we find gross abuses of state power in service to corruption and can only speculate about what doesn’t get reported. Infotainment is killing us.
Skepticat
My old, largely unused journalism degree has prodded me to (a) scream wildly at the laptop and (b) subscribe to the newspaper. Neither has really helped my sense of outrage or a frisson of fear about further atrocities.
bbleh
“Police Chief Gideon Cody refused to comment on the raid or what led to it, saying only that he was disappointed that the article failed to note the department’s sharp new uniforms, including epaulettes, jackboots, and armbands of his own design.”
Shalimar
@eversor: Swatting is not politics agnostic. Yes, it started in gaming culture and still exists there. But a lot of the racist misogynistic pricks who began as young asshole gamers have graduated in the last 15 years to Republican politics. Swatting happens all the time for political reasons, and 90%+ is from the rightwing.
Chris Johnson
@Skepticat: That’s what feds are for.
This is why we do not assign individual citizens the obligation to don their AR-15s and stand in defense of the newspaper office. It’s not your JOB to personally defend the newspaper. You delegate that to an authority. If a small town police department runs amok in this way, you bunker down and call in the feds. And rightly so.
Embra
Subscribed (Thanks so much for the suggestion, I was wondering how to get some tangible support to them.)
Mai Naem mobileI
The congressman that represents the area Jake LaTurner has yet to make a statement. Remember it was at his meeting that the newspaper reporter got kicked out. I found it interesting that Kari Newell’s DUI was from 2008. I would like to know what kind of DUI it was. Was it some extreme DUI that involved somebody getting injured or was it more of a regular DUI which she just hadn’t taken care of due to financial reasons?
mbobier
@JMG: Amen!!!
bbleh
@Chris Johnson: That’s what feds are for.
You realize you have to sing that, right?
Miss Bianca
As a reporter for another little paper which has had its clashes with county officials in a ruby-red county – clashes that led to a First Amendment violation case where we won damages against them – I am following this story very closely. And sent the Kansas Reflector article off to my publisher posthaste after Yarrow posted it – yesterday? Day before?
Off-site cloud storage for *all* our files is coming.
What a sad, scary, enraging story.
Miss Bianca
@Miss Bianca:
btw…if anyone is feeling like expanding their “small, independent newspapers struggling in rural areas”?…please consider subscribing/contributing to either of the journals I write for (shameless bleg, I know, but despite my contributions they both do some damn fine work!): The Wet Mountain Tribune or the Ark Valley Voice.
The Tribune comes in both paper and e-editions; AVV is online only.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that after seeing this Kansas example, I can see the same thing happening to one or both if we pissed off the wrong people with our investigative reporting. The Trib been losing advertising because of the relentless smear campaigns conducted by the right-wing rag in town.
Just a thought, if y’all are feeling generous towards small-town journalism.
dimmsdale
@Miss Bianca: You write for the Ark Valley Voice?! I subscribed to it when Adam Silverman started writing a security column there (presumably not the only BJ regular who’s done so), and it’s one of the online subscriptions I’ve kept up with, as the paper has gone thru management changes and conversion to nonprofit ownership. Thanks for fighting the good fight!
dimmsdale
@dimmsdale: ETA, I don’t believe Adam is doing his security column for them anymore….something has come along that seems to occupy a good bit of his time lately (understatement of the year) the results of which are available on this very website every night.
rikyrah
Thank you for FrontPaging this. I was furious when I read about it yesterday😠
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Redshift:
Word is that they took his mother’s router. Her fucking router! WTF that has to do with identity theft is beyond me. It seems that it was done just to be assholes and flex on the old lady. It sounds like her son set her house up so it was digitally assistive to her and they took it all down, leaving her with nothing.
The whole story is nuts and these cold fucks are just cruel.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shalimar: Some swatting is false flag swatting, to djin up sympathy for such scumbags as MTG.
Fake Irishman
@Miss Bianca:
I’ll second Ms. Bianca’s call here. local Advertising is the lifeblood of small town newspapers, but even a couple hundred subscriptions can make a huge difference in generating enough money to make some critical capital investments (say cloud storage) or hiring an extra part time reporter.
I ran a weekly in rural upstate New York for three years with a circulation of about 1700. Incredibly satisfying and important job, but some one with deep pockets and a bone to pick could have crushed us easily.