How Did That Flagrantly Illegal Raid on a Kansas Newspaper Happen? The Editor Has an Idea. (2024)

On Friday, Aug. 11, the entire police force of Marion, Kansas, raided the offices of the local newspaper, the Marion Record, along with the home of the paper’s 98-year-old publisher, Joan Meyer, seizing every computer and phone in both buildings. The next day, she died, which the Record blamed on the raid. After several days of nationwide furor and the launch of a state investigation, the county attorney withdrew the search warrant and declared he would return the paper’s materials.

Since the raid, the Record and its editor, Eric Meyer—Joan’s son—have become poster children for press freedom amid small-town government bullying. Meyer returned to his hometown of Marion in 2021 after a career in journalism in Wisconsin and Illinois, taking over the paper he’d bought along with his parents decades before. I spoke to Meyer on the phone Monday afternoon about how the paper was bouncing back, his mother’s long life as a newspaperwoman, and his combative relationship with the town’s mayor and police chief. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: Congratulations on the county attorney withdrawing the search warrant. Have you confirmed that you got everything back?

Eric Meyer: What’s actually happening is the forensic people are cloning everything, and they’re gonna study the clone to make sure there was no tampering. There’s still four computers, three hard drives, and a router that they’re working on.

Does it seem like things were tampered with?

I don’t know that they’ve done enough to know for sure that nothing was touched. The sheriff told us that it went into their custody and no one looked at it after that, and I have no reason to doubt him. But they did spend a lot of time in our newsroom with nobody around to watch. We just posted a video of the raid on my mother’s home, which ends with them photographing my bank statement. I don’t know why they did that, unless they wanted to see if I was somehow profiting on my so-called identity theft.

So, how on Earth did this totally unconstitutional raid happen?

I think this is a confluence of personal animus from the mayor, a personal attempt to intimidate us from the police chief, and basic incompetence from the judge and the county attorney.

Even though anyone would look at this and say, “Wait, that doesn’t seem like a thing you do in America.”

There’s an attitude around here that you can do anything you want until some judge tells you you can’t. It doesn’t matter what the law is. The mayor recently claimed he was gonna waive FAA regulations at the airport. You can’t waive federal regulations! You can hope that someone doesn’t have enough money to stand up for their rights. Well, we don’t have a lot of money, but if we challenge them, people will support us. And if you read my email, they’re supporting us from the extreme left and the extreme right. This is one of the few issues that unites both sides.

You really think the judge is incompetent?

I don’t know. We interviewed a former judge from the same district. We described the scenario, and he said, “Oh, my God, I would never sign that. That’s a $30 million federal lawsuit waiting to happen.” Now, she is not a Marion County judge. She’s from Morris County. We have a full-fledged judge, not a magistrate judge, and where that person was, we don’t know. Did someone reject the search warrant and they went to find another judge? We don’t know.

Judges here are basically appointed by who’s interested, and these are the people who are interested. For the most part, people around here don’t get involved in government. They want it to be Pleasantville, everything in black and white. They don’t want to argue with their neighbors. They want things tidy. But democracy isn’t tidy! It never has been! Sometimes you have to have a nice good argument with somebody.

I’m very sorry about your mother. Tell me about her life as a newspaperwoman.

She started work basically when I was old enough to go to school. She was your typical super copy editor. She could spell better than anybody I ever met. She particularly knew the people of the community. We used to have this stupid “country correspondent” column about who ate dinner with whom. She’d be able to say, “He wouldn’t eat dinner with them!” Most of the time she was a very sweet, smiling person, but she was also a formidable woman who would stick up for herself. She was not a fainting rose. She had a very strong sense of morality and a strong sense of civic responsibility.

The paper has been investigating the police chief, Gideon Cody, but hadn’t run anything about him yet.

That’s gonna change in a few minutes. I’ve got the story sitting on my desk. As soon as I’m off the phone with you, I’m gonna edit and we’re gonna post it. It’s gonna say we told the city about his problems in Kansas City and they didn’t listen. The lede is “Cody has a shiny exterior, but when you dig deeper, it’s not pretty.”

We don’t have a named source, but we have more than six sources for this information. To be honest, we probably should have run this before. But we wanted to do things the way they do them around here, to be careful, to be gentle, to run it by everyone and give the council a chance to take action. But now we’re running it.

That doesn’t worry you, antagonizing a police chief?

Well, the nice thing is, he’s done most of what he can do. He’s taken his shot and didn’t kill us.

What’s the next step on the raid?

Next step for us is getting the last of our equipment back. For our lawyer, it’s figuring out where the federal lawsuit’s gonna be filed. For the readers, the residents, it’s figuring out what’s actually been happening—what were they being distracted from by this.

How are you paying for the lawyers? Are you getting contributions? Are foundations or organizations helping out?

We’re getting contributions. The Society of Professional Journalists has supplied money. But also, our lawyer said, “Do you have libel insurance?” We did, and our policy has a clause in it about seizures, and they’ll cover 90 percent of it. I said, “Really?!” I hadn’t even thought to look at that. I hadn’t even considered a government seizure as a possibility. It was like, “We will cover you if a giant meteor from Saturn comes in.”

How are your reporters doing? Is this week’s paper going to publish on time?

We’re sure gonna try! We’re behind this week, as we were last week. We missed our deadline by five and a half hours last week, but we got our paper printed nevertheless. I’m hoping we’ll meet our deadline this week. People want to help! I had a trucker call me and say, “I don’t have any computers, but if you need anything picked up in these five states, I’ll drive it over.” And since this happened we’ve sold 4,000 subscriptions. Our print run before this was 4,000.

That’s heartening.

Look, newspaper subscriptions are down. TV news ratings, real news, are down. People shouting at each other on cable isn’t news. I was on Cuomo this week, and he referred to himself as a journalist. Sorry, he’s not a journalist. He’s just not! I don’t know any real journalist who would say he was.

What made you return to Marion after a career at the Milwaukee Journal and as a professor?

It’s not for the money. I’ve got my Journal retirement. I’m about to start collecting Social Security. I came here because I wanted to keep the newspaper from going to a chain. I bought it with my father, and I never expected to see that money back. It’s money I’d sort of written off the books. You know, I’ve also got an old Miata in the garage, and I never expect to sell that either. Maybe I’ll get to drive it if I ever get the dang thing fixed. But I got the newspaper fixed, and I get to drive that.