Analysis: What the police raid of a Kansas newspaper says about government and the press

The highly unusual police raid of a newspaper’s office in a small Kansas town and its editor’s home set off a media frenzy across the country last week. It also raised concerns about the eroding relationships between local government officials and the reporters who cover them.

The seizure of computers, cellphones, bank records and other materials from the Marion County Record was decried by reporters and journalism organizations as heavy-handed.

The outrage only grew when Joan Meyer, a 98-year-old co-owner of the paper, died the day after the raids. Meyer’s son, Eric, is the paper’s editor.

Within days, the local prosecutor announced that the police did not have enough evidence to support a search warrant for the paper’s offices, and ordered law enforcement to return all of the materials they seized.

“It was an unconscionable, illegal action by law enforcement against journalists who were just doing their jobs for their community,” said Diana Fuentes, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and dozens of news organizations sent a letter to Gideon Cody, the chief of the Marion Police Department, calling the search warrant “overbroad, improperly intrusive and possibly in violation of federal law.”

Public officials in Kansas were more circumspect.

Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, said in a TV interview that the situation made her “anxious” but would not say whether she thought anyone’s rights were violated.

Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, said the Kansas Bureau of Investigation was working with local police because of allegations that newspaper personnel improperly accessed a secure criminal justice computer system.

“The KBI was not, of course, involved in these searches and was not notified of the searches prior to their taking place,” Kobach noted.

The raid came after the paper investigated – but did not publish stories about – the criminal record of a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a public meeting with a local member of Congress.

After the raid, The Record reported this week that the restaurant owner had lost her driver’s license for drunk driving, an offense that could jeopardize her effort to get a liquor license. The paper also disclosed that it had looked into allegations of misconduct about Cody, the police chief, when he was hired several months ago.

Upon taking office, Cody cut off the paper’s access to records of routine activities the department engaged in every week, something that had been a regular feature in the newspaper for decades.

Police rarely seek search warrants on news organizations, mostly because federal law directs them in almost all cases to pursue information with subpoenas instead. The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980’s “subpoena first” approach gives reporters and newspaper owners a chance to challenge subpoenas in court before having to turn over contested materials.

But the Kansas raid comes at a time when relations between public officials and journalists are especially fraught. Former President Donald Trump regularly blasted legitimate news gathering as “fake news,” and that has emboldened other elected officials to attack reporters as adversaries as well.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, has made a combative relationship with the press part of his public persona.

“There is an age-old tension [between the press and public officials] because folks don’t want the truth to be told about them if it’s going to impact their power,” Max Kautsch, a Kansas lawyer who handles First Amendment and open government cases, told Route Fifty. “But what we are seeing here is the culmination of attempts to destabilize and demonize the institutions of this country, including the press.”

“For these local law enforcement officials, respect for the First Amendment and the press as a viable institution that needs to be protected by the law [has] eroded rather significantly,” Kautsch said. “Demonizing institutions this way makes reporters way more vulnerable here in 2023 than they were before 2015.”

But Stephen Wolgast, a Knight chair and professor of the practice of journalism at the University of Kansas, said the Marion County raid was an outlier.

“It’s a one-off in the United States, let alone Kansas,” he said. “Antagonism is really played out more in terms of either name-calling by politicians — like ‘fake news’ kind of stuff — or just not responding” to reporters.

“I’m aware of nothing even close to, in my opinion, deceiving a judge to get a search warrant instead of a subpoena … to raid the entire newsroom and the [editor’s] house,” he said.

Still, other incidents have rattled reporters:

• An elected official in the Las Vegas area stands accused of murdering Jeff German, an investigative reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, last year.
• County officials in Oklahoma were caught on a recording discussing plans to kill a reporter who regularly covered them.
• The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented 93 cases of law enforcement seizing journalists’ equipment or work since 2017. Police most often took reporters’ cellphones and cameras. 
• In Kansas, a 2010 dispute about a Dodge City reporter’s jailhouse interview with a murder suspect led to the passage of a state shield law to protect journalists from having to divulge their sources in court. The law passed with overwhelming majorities in the Kansas Legislature, despite deep partisan divides there.

If the Marion officials wanted to pursue information held by reporters, they should have filed a criminal case and then subpoenaed the newspaper, which could have then asserted its rights under the state shield law, Kautsch said. But it’s likely local law enforcement didn’t know about the federal or state protections when they pursued their search warrant instead, he said.

New laws aren’t needed as much as adherence to existing protections, Kautsch said. “I’m not sure that a shield law can do much to prevent the government from violating First and Fourth Amendment rights,” he said.

Wolgast, the professor, said press scrutiny is part of public life in the U.S.

Officials “need to be willing to let their constituents look at the work they do and criticize them, because they are working for us,” he said. “If you don’t want the scrutiny, take a different job. And if you think the press is treating you unfairly, have lunch with the reporter, have lunch with the editor and talk about what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, police in Marion returned the equipment to the Marion County Record employees. The newspaper put out a paper this week with the headline: “SEIZED… but not silenced.”