In Marion, Kansas, [August 11], four local police officers and three
sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record newspaper;
the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer;
and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell
phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the
raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died
at her home.
The search warrant alleged there was
probable cause to believe the newspaper, its owners, or the vice mayor had
committed identity theft and unlawful computer acts against restaurant owner
Kari Newell, but Magistrate Laura Viar appears to have issued that warrant
without any affidavit of wrongdoing on which to base it. Sherman Smith, Sam
Bailey, Rachel Mipro, and Tim Carpenter of the nonprofit news service Kansas
Reflector reported that federal law protects journalists from search
and seizure and requires law enforcement instead to subpoena materials they
want.
On August 2, Newell had thrown Meyer and a Marion County Record reporter
out of a meeting with U.S. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), and the paper
had run a story on the incident. Newell had complained on her personal Facebook
page,
On August 7, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of illegally getting information
about a drunk-driving charge against her and giving it to Herbel. Eric Meyer
says the information—which was accurate—was sent to him and Herbel over social
media and that he decided not to publish it out of concerns it was leaked to
help Newell’s estranged husband in divorce proceedings. Those same concerns
made him take the story to local police. Newell accused the newspaper of
violating her rights and called Meyer to accuse him of identity theft.
Meyer told journalist Marisa Kabas
of The Handbasket that the paper was also investigating the
new police chief for sexual misconduct, and he noted that the identities of
people making those allegations are on the computers that got seized. “I may be
paranoid that this has anything to do with it,” Meyer told Kabas, “but when
people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.”
On Friday, Newell wrote on her
Facebook page: “Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied
half-truths…. We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading
insinuations.”
Meyer worked at the Milwaukee
Journal for 20 years and then taught journalism at the University of
Illinois, retiring from there. He doesn’t take a salary from the Marion
County Record. He told Kabas, “I’m doing this because I believe that
newspapers still have a place in the world and that the worst thing that a
newspaper could do was shrink its reporting staff, stop reporting, fill itself
with non-news when there’s still news out there. And if you do a good job of
providing news, you will get readers…. [W]e’re doing this because we care about
the community.”
He said he worries that people are
afraid to participate in politics because “there’s gonna be consequences and
they’re going to be negative.”
The Marion County Record will
sue the city and the individuals involved in the raid, which, the paper wrote
in its coverage, “legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated
multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple
court rulings.” “Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer
said, “but we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed
to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”
Executive director of the Kansas Press
Association Emily Bradbury noted “An attack on a newspaper office through an
illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an
assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know.
This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Americans have taken up this cause
before. In 1836 the House of Representatives passed a resolution preventing
Congress from taking up any petition, memorial, resolution, proposition, or
paper relating “in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of
slavery or the abolition of slavery.” This “gag rule” outraged antislavery
northerners. Rather than quieting their objections to enslavement, they
increased their discussion of slavery and stood firm on their right to those
discussions.
In that same year, newspaperman Elijah
P. Lovejoy, who had been publishing antislavery articles in the St.
Louis Observer, decided to move from the slave state of Missouri across the
Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois. He suggested to his concerned neighbors
that his residence in a free state would enable him to write more about
religion than about slavery. But, he added in a statement to them, “As long as
I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I
shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write and to publish whatever I
please, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.”
Lovejoy became a symbol of the freedom
of the press.
When “a committee of five citizens” in
Alton, appointed by “a public meeting,” asked Lovejoy if he intended to print
sentiments to which they objected, he refused to “admit that the liberty of the
press and freedom of speech, were rightfully subject to other supervision and
control, than [the laws of] the land.” He reminded them that “‘the liberty of
our forefathers has given us the liberty of speech,’ and that it is ‘our duty
and high privilege, to act and speak on all questions touching
this great commonwealth.’” “[E]very thing having a tendency to bring this right
into jeopardy, is eminently dangerous as a precedent,” he said.
Popular pressure had proved unable to
make Lovejoy stop writing, and on August 21, 1837, a mob drove off the office staff of the Alton Observer by
throwing rocks through the windows. Then, as soon as the staff had fled, the
mob broke into the newspaper’s office and destroyed the press and all the
type.
On August 24, Lovejoy asked his supporters to help him buy another press. They did.
But no sooner had it arrived than a gang of ten or twelve “ruffians” broke into
the warehouse where it had been stored for the night and threw it into the
river.
When yet another press arrived in
early November, Lovejoy had it placed in a warehouse on the riverbank. That
night, about thirty men attacked the building, demanding the press be handed
over to them. The men inside refused and fired into the crowd, wounding some of
the attackers. The mob pulled back but then returned with ladders that enabled
them to set fire to the building’s roof. When Lovejoy stepped out of the
building to see where the attackers were hiding, a man shot him dead. As the
rest of the men in the warehouse ran to safety, the mob rushed into the
building and threw the press out of the window. It broke to pieces when it hit
the shore, and the men threw the pieces into the Mississippi River.
But the story did not end there.
Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, saw Elijah shot. "I shall never
forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother's blood," he
declared. He and another brother wrote the Memoir of Elijah P. Lovejoy,
impressing on readers the importance of what they called “liberty of the press”
in the discussion of public issues.
Owen then turned to politics, and in
1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature to stand against those
southerners who had silenced his brother. The following year, voters elected
him to Congress. His increasing prominence brought him political friends,
including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by
way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln.
—Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.mcguirewoods.com/news-resources/publications/media.0101.pdf
The Handbasket
A conversation with the
newspaper owner raided by cops
Very few stories these days take my breath away, but this
one did the trick: Cops in Kansas raided the office of local newspaper the
Marion County Record Friday morning because of a
complaint by a local restaurant owner named Kari Newell. She was unhappy with the
outlet’s reporting on how…
12 hours ago · 81 likes · 8 comments · Marisa Kabas
Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir
of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; who was murdered in defence of liberty of the
press,” (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), at https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/tas/Abbott_716.pdf
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