Another Marion County update:
How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism
A police raid without precedent on a weekly newspaper alarmed First Amendment advocates. The real story of how it happened, though, is rooted in the roiling tensions and complex history of a few key community members.
By Jonathan O'Connell
,
Paul Farhi
and
Sofia Andrade
August 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
MARION, Kan. — The phone conversation between the journalist and the town’s newly hired police chief quickly turned contentious.
Tipsters had been telling Deb Gruver that Gideon Cody left the police department in Kansas City, Mo., under a cloud, supposedly threatened with demotion. So now she was asking him difficult questions on behalf of the weekly Marion County Record about the career change that had brought him to this prairie community of 1,900 people.
The chief bristled.
“If you’re going to be writing bad things about me,” they both recall him telling the reporter, “I might just not take the job.”
He also advised Gruver that he had hired a lawyer.
Cody later said he had been on guard during the conversation, having been warned by longtime residents that the Record could be overly aggressive in its reporting.
“If you live in Marion, you understand,” he told The Washington Post. “If you don’t live in Marion, you don’t understand.”
Gruver wouldn’t publish any of her reporting on Cody for months to come. But their confrontation in April marked an escalation in long-running tensions between a group of local journalists and the officials and community members they cover that would boil over through the summer.
The small-town intrigue might have stayed in a small town, though, had Cody not initiated a dramatic step earlier this month. Responding to a local businesswoman’s allegation that the paper had illegally accessed her driving record, Cody obtained search warrants from a magistrate judge and led half a dozen officers on an Aug. 11 raid of the Record’s offices and the home of its editor and publisher — seizing computers, servers, cellphones and other files.
The raid was so unusual, and so alarming in its implications for the news media, that it quickly exploded into an international story. Press-advocacy organizations universally condemned the raid as a breach of state and federal laws that protect the media from government intrusion. Within days, a caravan of TV news trucks was rumbling through Marion’s business district, a modest collection of low-slung brick buildings.
The emotional response to the raid was heightened by the sudden death of the editor’s 98-year-old mother, who had railed furiously at the officers sorting through her belongings at their home and collapsed a day later. The Record blamed her death on her agitation over the raid.
Police raid home of Kansas newspaper publisher
1:29
Surveillance footage showed authorities searching the home of Marion Record co-owner Joan Meyer, 98, on Aug. 11. (Video: Eric Meyer via AP)
“Get out of my house!” Joan Meyer had shouted at Cody from behind her walker before calling him an expletive, home surveillance video revealed. “Don’t you touch any of that stuff!”
Yet parsing the events that led to the search — and understanding its larger implications for a free press in the United States — comes down to untangling the.......
wapo.st |
