Marion County Record co-owner Joan Meyer leaned into her walker and stood up to law enforcement personnel executing a search warrant in her living room during a bizarre series of legally questionable raids of her residence, the newspaper’s office and a city council member’s home.
”When powerful people go after journalists and news outlets, they go after everyone. … Let’s look at outrages big and small from across the United States,” Clay Wirestone writes in this Kansas Reflector column.
Journalists at the Marion County Record worked late into the night to publish their first issue since the widely-criticized raid. “SEIZED… but not silenced,” its headline read.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ board unanimously offered $20,000 to the Marion County Record for legal costs in wake of the seizure of newspaper and personal property by local law enforcement.
The top law enforcement officer in Kansas appeared to justify a Marion County search warrant that led to an unprecedented raid on a local newspaper and potentially contributed to the death of the paper’s co-owner.
Marion County police on Saturday defended their unprecedented raid on a newspaper office and the publisher’s home, and the publisher’s mother died from stress.
In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Lawrence Accountability
Lawrence Times reporter Chansi Long was targeted by city staff and ordered by police to leave the North Lawrence campsite for people experiencing homelessness Tuesday night while other members of the public were allowed to remain. “That’s a problem,” a local First Amendment expert said.
Gary Rohman/FIRE
Haskell Indian Nations University is facing a lawsuit from its student newspaper after the school allegedly cut the paper’s funding and sought to prevent the editor from conducting newsgathering after critical coverage of the university.
