Defiant Marion County Record hits newsstands following police raid

MARION, Kansas, August 17, 2023—At midday Wednesday, television crews were setting up for live broadcasts outside the Marion County Record; phones were ringing off the hook; and the paper’s owner, Eric Meyer was on a carousel of interviews about the police raid on their offices five days earlier.

In the back room, surrounded by old typesetting equipment and a long defunct printing press, it was relatively calm and orderly. The paper’s two-woman delivery team, Barb Creamer and Bev Baldwin, both retirees in their 70s, loaded up copies of the latest weekly edition—the first since police seized the newsroom’s computers, file servers, and reporters’ personal cellphones, triggering a national debate about press freedom in the United States.

“It’s not right, it’s just not right,” said Baldwin, wearing a red “Keep America Great” Trump 2024 shirt and denim shorts for her delivery run, of the August 11 raid.

“We still can’t believe it happened,” Creamer said, as she stacked papers into postal containers and reflected on the Friday raid, which Meyer believes contributed to the death on Saturday of his mother, 98-year-old co-owner Joan Meyer, after the police searched her home.

A small memorial with a photograph of Joan Meyer decorated with bright fake flowers was set up outside the paper’s office by the local Lutheran church. A few locals had stopped to leave bouquets ahead of her funeral, scheduled for August 19.

Creamer and Baldwin, who had been delivering the paper for four years, spoke fondly of Joan Meyer, who had been a writer and editor at the paper since the 1960s, and continued to run “Memories,” a weekly column about local history. This week’s column included entries about the return of an Afghanistan war veteran 15 years ago, a Christian Sunday school picnic 110 years ago, and a political convention 145 years ago. It appeared across the page from her obituary.

“She didn’t care who you were or what you did, she treated everyone the same,” said Baldwin, bemused by, but grateful for, the flurry of media interest in the small Kansas paper.

The Marion County Record’s four-person newsroom worked until 5 a.m. Wednesday to get the paper to the printer. It was a grueling task as the police had confiscated vital equipment, including formatting templates and hard drives.

“I didn’t know what an all-nighter really was,” said staff reporter Phyllis Zorn, 63, who wrote five stories despite her phone and computer being in police custody.

The team took turns using the computer of the part-time sports reporter and photographer, and several other devices that police did not seize. Meyer, Zorn, and staff reporter Deb Gruver were sealed off in the back of the office, while the head of the Kansas Press Association, Emily Bradbury, answered phones and visiting reporters’ questions.

The headline for Wednesday’s paper in giant bold font, “SEIZED…but not silenced,” captured the defiant mood of the newsroom, days after Marion Police Department officers executed a warrant to search for devices used to access the Kansas Department of Revenue records and records relating to a local restaurant owner.

CPJ and more than 30 other press freedom advocates condemned the raid as overly broad and intrusive—”particularly when other investigative steps may have been available”—and potentially violating federal law that limits law enforcement’s ability to search newsrooms.

CPJ’s calls and emailed request for comment to Marion County Police Chief Gideon Cody, who said Sunday that the raid was legal and tied to an investigation, were unanswered.

Meyer, 69, said he was determined to keep the Marion County Record going. His father worked at the paper from 1948, purchased it in 1998, and gave it to his wife and son in 2005, the year before he died. Meyer returned home to Marion three years ago to run the paper, leaving his job as an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“The last thing we want to do is to have people believe that we stopped publishing,” Meyer said, after giving an impromptu press conference to the small scrum of reporters who had appeared in his newsroom. “If we hadn’t been able to figure out how to get the computers together, Phyllis and I and everybody else would be handwriting Post-it notes and putting them on doors around town.”

Many people, in Marion and beyond, clearly backed him. Locals stopped by to offer support, while staff and volunteers fielded calls from well-wishers, journalists, and new subscribers from California to Florida, and England to New Zealand.

Office manager Cheri Bentz said that it was heartwarming to receive help from so many of the town’s 2,000 residents.

“That’s the way with a small town, we’re all supposed to look out for each other,” she said, her desk piled with new subscriber requests and notes from the many phone calls she had taken, while she also formatted the paper and uploaded it to the internet.

Dennis Calvert, a 67-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, drove an hour north to Marion from Wichita to purchase a six-month subscription. “It just shoves a burr up my butt, and it’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t be tolerated,” said Calvert, wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the Great Seal and the words “Dysfunctional veteran.”

Since August 11, the paper received over 2,000 new subscriptions, a huge boost to its pre-raid subscriber base of 4,000, Meyer said.

“Assuming everything comes back, then we can start downloading the literally thousands of email messages we have received,” Meyer said, wryly noting that he was curious to find out whether one new subscriber, Laura Kelly, was the Kansas governor or merely shared her name.

Becoming serious, Meyer said he appreciated how many people had rallied round to get the paper back on its feet.

“Hopefully other places will see that if you run into trouble, there will be people who can help you out,” Meyer said.

He has already secured one victory.

On Wednesday, Marion County’s prosecutor withdrew the search warrant, saying there was insufficient evidence for it. The paper’s staff retrieved their devices from the police and turned them over to a forensic examiner, who was working with their legal team, to assess whether law enforcement had accessed them.

Meanwhile, it was business as usual for the delivery team. Creamer pulled up in her black SUV outside Dale’s Supermarket in Hillsboro, some 10 miles west of Marion.

“I bet these’ll all sell out,” she said happily, after pushing a stack of Marion County Records into a rusty red newspaper dispenser standing next to soda pop machines outside the store.

Along her 50-mile route, Creamer quickly popped in and out of gas station stations, grocery stores, and a post office, delivering thick stacks of the newspapers.

“Finally! We’ve had people in here all day looking for the papers,” said one convenience store cashier, as Creamer dropped off the new edition.  

“Well, be thankful they’re here!” Creamer replied sweetly, before squeezing back behind three mini rubber ducks and a delivery tally sheet on her dashboard, turning the air conditioning up full blast, and setting off to deliver the slowly shrinking pile of papers in the trunk behind her.