When I first heard the story of the Marion County Record, I could see my reporter notebooks scattered across that newsroom floor. I imagine my laptop bag being hauled away as evidence, my phone sealed in a plastic bag, my camera’s memory cards quarantined, my sources suddenly cut off because someone in power did not like the questions the staff were asking.
In August 2023, officers in a rural Kansas county raided the Record’s office, the home of publisher Eric Meyer, and the home he shared with his 98-year-old mother, Joan. They seized computers, cellphones, and reporting files over a tip about a local business owner’s driving record and the paper’s scrutiny of the town’s police chief.
Now, more than two years later, the county has agreed to pay more than $3 million and issue a formal apology. Money and words can’t bring back Joan Meyer, who unfortunately died the day after the raid. Still, the settlement is an official acknowledgment that what happened in Marion was wrong—not just unwise, not just heavy-handed, but a violation of the fundamental freedoms journalists rely on.
As a freelance journalist, I work without the safety net of a big legal department or powerful corporate owner. I have filed stories from kitchen tables, coffee shops, and gymnasiums. If police can storm into a paper, seize everything that makes reporting possible, and face no consequences, then every freelancer’s notebook and hard drive is at risk.
What haunts me most is how ordinary the Record’s work was—checking public records, vetting a liquor license application, and looking into a new police chief’s background. These are the unglamorous, everyday tasks that keep small communities honest. When those routines are criminalized, the message to reporters is clear: stop asking hard questions, or we will come for you.
The Marion settlement won’t end attacks on the press, but it does something vital. It draws a bright, expensive line around the First Amendment and reminds local officials everywhere that raiding a newsroom is not just bad optics—it’s an assault on democracy itself.
PHOTO CREDIT: Marion County Record wordmark. (by Marion County Record via Wikimedia)
