Writers and Editors

Updated 5-7-24.

As you may recall, law enforcement officers in a rural Kansas county raided the offices and homes of the editors of a local newspaper, seizing electronic newsgathering equipment and reporting materials -- resulting in a nationwide uproar over the threats to our First Amendment principles of a free press. Following are some articles about the incident.

---A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 8-12-23) Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief, Gideon Cody, prior to the raids on his office and home. They did so because of a complaint by a local restaurant owner named Kari Newell. [This is the piece that took the story viral.]

---How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism (Jonathan O'Connell, Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade, Washington Post, 8-26-23. Illustrated.) 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.

     "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.

     "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 complex interrelationships and tortured history of a small group of people coexisting in a single small town.
     At the center of everything were a business owner, a police chief and a newspaper."

---The Marion raid and the Privacy Protection Act (Gabe Rottman, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 8-21-23)

    How does the “subpoena-first” rule in the Privacy Protection Act actually work?
   "During the raid, the police carted off computers, cell phones, and documents. The computers, and possibly the phones, will contain not only raw reporting material — information and documents gathered, maybe photographs, etc. — but also things like unpublished stories and other actual “news” that reflects the editorial work of the reporters at the Record (all that stuff on all the computers seized). There is no "subpoena-first" rule for the latter, but it receives higher protections than the raw “documentary material” that is obtainable with a subpoena.

   RCFP addresses the question How does the "subpoena-first" rule in the Privacy Protection Act — the federal law limiting law enforcement's ability to conduct newsroom searches — actually work?  In so doing the authors unpack and clarify several terms — "work product" and "documentary materials" and "unlawful acts" — as well as several exceptions: the "suspect" exception and threats to life or limb, and “reason to believe” and the “subpoena-first” exception. And they conclude:

     "In short, it is true that the "subpoena-first" exception reflects the law's intention that police always use the least intrusive means possible when inquiring into the business of the newsroom, and, in practice, gives affected journalists and news organizations the ability to negotiate or challenge a legal demand. But it's important to remember that there is no such rule for a reporter's actual work, in recognition of the heightened sensitivity there. And that's potentially relevant in the Marion case in that the police department may have seized work product related to the newspaper's investigation into the police chief himself."

---After a police raid on a Kansas newspaper, questions mount (Sofia Andrade and Paul Farhi, Washington Post, 8-13-23) Law enforcement seized computers and other records from the Marion County Record on Friday, raising concerns about press freedom. Restaurant owner Kari Newell "claimed that the newspaper, the Marion County Record, had illegally obtained damaging information about a 2008 conviction for drunken driving and was preparing to publish it, leading a local judge to issue a warrant authorizing police to seize the newspaper’s files.
     'The Record, a family-owned weekly serving the small town of about 1,900, didn’t publish the information about Newell’s conviction for drunken driving and has denied that it came by it illegally.
      'Police raids on news organizations are almost unknown in the United States and are illegal under most circumstances under state and federal law.       

      “This shouldn’t happen in America,” said Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, in an interview Sunday. She added: “Freedom of the press is fundamental to our democracy. … We’re not going to let this stand on our watch.”
     'Bradbury said the newspaper’s records could have been obtained via a subpoena, a court-ordered command for specific material that is subject to legal objections, not “an unannounced search.”

---Warrant for Kansas newspaper raid withdrawn by prosecutor for ‘insufficient evidence’ (Luke Nozicka, Jonathan Shorman, and Katie Moore, Kansas City Star, 8-30-23) On Wednesday, August 16, the county prosecutor withdrew the search warrant and directed law enforcement to return the seized material.

---Kansas commission seeks magistrate’s perspective on Marion search warrant complaint (Tim Carpenter,Kansas Reflector, 9-6-23) Judge Laura Viar asked to respond to ethics claim leveled by Topekan. First Amendment attorneys said they were convinced the judge ought to have been able to grasp the warrants were constitutionally flawed. The search warrant was secured based on an assertion a Record reporter somehow violated state law by looking up information on a public website of the Kansas Department of Revenue about a restaurant owner's driving license status.

• Kansas newspaper that was raided by Marion police sues officials for attack on free press (Sherman Smiht, Kasnsas Reflector, 4-1-24)

According to a 127-page complaint filed Monday, former Mayor David Mayfield ordered the takedown of the newspaper and a political rival after identifying journalists as “the real villains in America.” The Marion County Record lawsuit says mayor, police chief and sheriff sought revenge for critical news coverage. Joan Meyer, who co-owned the newspaper with her son, repeatedly told officers the stress of ransacking her home was going to kill her, and “that’s going to be murder.” She was so traumatized by the raid she wouldn’t eat, drink or sleep. She died the next day from cardiac arrest.

• A reporter is suing a Kansas town and various officials over a police raid on her newspaper (John Hanna, AP, 2-13-24) Reporter Phyllis Zorn filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the weekly newspaper's hometown and local officials, saying the raid caused her physical and mental health problems. Former Record reporter Deb Gruver sued Cody less than three weeks after the raid.         

   "The lawsuit said before the raid, Zorn had seizures that were controlled by medication so that she had gone as long as five years without having one. Within days of the raid, the seizures returned." The reporters were scheduled for mediation in April 2024.

---Office of the State Fire Marshal Supplemental Report. A detailed account of the event and its aftermath in Joan Meyer's home (before she died).

      Includes "WHEN THE POLICE KNOCK AT YOUR DOOR: NEWSROOM SEARCH WARRANTS" by Jonathan E. Buchan and Corby Anderson, Media Law, MaguireWoods, January 2001

"The federal Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa-2000aa-12, protects journalists from most searches of newsrooms by federal and state law enforcement officials. The Act supplements the protections that the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides to all citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures of their person, home, papers, and possessions. The Fourth Amendment requires that searches be "reasonable" and that search warrants be issued only when there is "probable cause" to believe that the evidence sought is in the place to be searched."

• Kansas officials downplayed involvement in Marion newspaper raid. Here’s what they knew (Sherman Smith, Missouri Independent, 11-6-23) A rather long account that answers a lot of questions many of us had. Documents show unquestioning support before raid, followed by attempts to sidestep outrage. "Scrutiny of the raid had intensified as the police chief and KBI director issued statements about journalists not being above the law — a distraction from the reality that if anyone had broken the law, it was the police. The newspaper’s 200-point bold type headline that morning read: “SEIZED … but not silenced.”

BLOG POSTS ON MEMOIRS, PERSONAL HISTORIES, AND LIFE STORY WRITING

(selected blog posts by Pat McNees)

• Arlene Friedman Shepherd: The Life She Loved (In memoriam, 2012)
• Ben Patton on interviewing military veterans (video, interviewed by RJ McHatton)
• Collaborating on memoirs (J.R. Moehringer and Andre Agassi)
• Coming-of-age memoirs make great gifts
• Helen Jean Medakovich Sarchielli (in memoriam)
• How reliable are our memories? How close to the truth?
• How-To Resources: Memoir, biography, and personal histories
• Is it still a great time to become a personal historian?
• Mark Twain on writing autobiography
• Memoirs of coping with chronic, rare, or invisible diseases, including mental health problems
• Memoirs of war and conflict: A reading list
• A memoir writer's dream come true
• Personal historians love their work
• Personal history videos (video by Peter Savigny of his mother, Remembering Renee)
• Photos and memoir writing
• A short history of the Association for Personal Historians
• Whose Truth? The ethics of memoir writing
• Why I love teaching Guided Autobiography (by Lisa Smith-Youngs)
• Writing workshops as group therapy
• Soundtrack of your life (engaging students with music, to write about a pivotal moment in their life)

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"Writing about [events in my life] has been a way of processing them. Not only tragedies like the deaths of my sons, but other things like learning of my adoption as an adult and my search for my birthmother. These are life-altering experiences and writing about something is a good way to figure out what to make of it.

     "Patients, of course, are an endless source of inspiration and stories. Psychiatry is a performance art. We talk with people; they tell us their secrets and their pain. They benefit from the conversations or not. But it’s all words in the air; our case notes are sealed and unless we write something down, the experiences are lost except to our memories. But we’re changed by these stories just as our patients are and the truths they lead us to are worth preserving. Writing down what we have learned also constitutes a kind of “ethical will,” something to convey to succeeding generations in the same way that we distribute our property. I think that we have some obligation before we die to enunciate whatever we think we’ve learned about life. So that was also a motivation to write these books, because I thought that whether anybody buys them or not, my children and their children will have this gift from me."
                              ~ Gordon Livingston, MD, author of Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now and And Never Stop  Dancing, interviewed by Bruce Hershfield for Maryland Psychiatrist

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In mid-August 2023, law enforcement officers in a rural Kansas county raided the offices and homes of the editors of a local newspaper, seizing electronic newsgathering equipment and reporting materials and resulting in a nationwide uproar over the threats to our First Amendment principles of a free press. ~ Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

 

To catch you up on the story, here are links to (and highlights from) various press reports:

---How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism (Jonathan O'Connell, Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade, Washington Post, 8-26-23. Illustrated.) '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.

     '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.

     "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 complex interrelationships and tortured history of a small group of people coexisting in a single small town.
     'At the center of everything were a business owner, a police chief and a newspaper.

 
---A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 8-12-23) Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief prior to the raids on his office and home. [This is the piece that took the story viral.]

---The Marion raid and the Privacy Protection Act (Gabe Rottman, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 8-21-23) How does the “subpoena-first” rule in the Privacy Protection Act actually work?

     "The raid unfolded in Marion, a town about 60 miles north of Wichita, and appears to have stemmed from a dispute between a local restaurant owner and her estranged husband in a divorce proceeding."
   "During the raid, the police carted off computers, cell phones, and documents. The computers, and possibly the phones, will contain not only raw reporting material — information and documents gathered, maybe photographs, etc. — but also things like unpublished stories and other actual “news” that reflects the editorial work of the reporters at the Record (all that stuff on all the computers seized). There is no "subpoena-first" rule for the latter, but it receives higher protections than the raw “documentary material” that is obtainable with a subpoena.

   RCFP addresses the question How does the "subpoena-first" rule in the Privacy Protection Act — the federal law limiting law enforcement's ability to conduct newsroom searches — actually work?  In so doing the authors unpack and clarify several terms — "work product" and "documentary materials" and "unlawful acts" — as well as several exceptions: the "suspect" exception and threats to life or limb, and “reason to believe” and the “subpoena-first” exception. And they conclude:

     "In short, it is true that the "subpoena-first" exception reflects the law's intention that police always use the least intrusive means possible when inquiring into the business of the newsroom, and, in practice, gives affected journalists and news organizations the ability to negotiate or challenge a legal demand. But it's important to remember that there is no such rule for a reporter's actual work, in recognition of the heightened sensitivity there. And that's potentially relevant in the Marion case in that the police department may have seized work product related to the newspaper's investigation into the police chief himself."

---After a police raid on a Kansas newspaper, questions mount (Sofia Andrade and Paul Farhi, Washington Post, 8-13-23) Law enforcement seized computers and other records from the Marion County Record on Friday, raising concerns about press freedom. 

     'Police raids on news organizations are almost unknown in the United States and are illegal under most circumstances under state and federal law. "This shouldn't happen in America," said Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association...

     Restaurant owner Kari Newell "claimed that the newspaper, the Marion County Record, had illegally obtained damaging information about a 2008 conviction for drunken driving and was preparing to publish it, leading a local judge to issue a warrant authorizing police to seize the newspaper’s files.
     'The Record, a family-owned weekly serving the small town of about 1,900, didn’t publish the information about Newell’s conviction for drunken driving and has denied that it came by it illegally.
      'Police raids on news organizations are almost unknown in the United States and are illegal under most circumstances under state and federal law.        “This shouldn’t happen in America,” said Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, in an interview Sunday. She added: “Freedom of the press is fundamental to our democracy. … We’re not going to let this stand on our watch.”
     'Bradbury said the newspaper’s records could have been obtained via a subpoena, a court-ordered command for specific material that is subject to legal objections, not “an unannounced search.”

---Warrant for Kansas newspaper raid withdrawn by prosecutor for ‘insufficient evidence’ (Luke Nozicka, Jonathan Shorman, and Katie Moore, Kansas City Star, 8-30-23) On Wednesday, August 16, the county prosecutor withdrew the search warrant and directed law enforcement to return the seized material. 

 

This ruckus is and should be a big deal in a country that values a free press.