Police raid on Kansas newspaper was an assault on free speech | Editorial

The police raid of a local newsroom in Kansas should serve as a reminder of how the free press and First Amendment rights of everyone remain under attack and must be protected.

Police seized computers, servers, and cell phones from reporters and editors at the Marion County Record, a family-owned newspaper with a circulation of about 4,000. Police also searched the home of the paper’s co-owner, Joan Meyer, 98. She became rattled by the aggressive police tactics and died the following afternoon.

The outrageous search was said to be linked to how the paper obtained a document containing information about a local restaurant owner’s drunken driving arrest, though the editor of the paper believes the intrusion stemmed from tensions fueled by the paper’s ongoing coverage of local government officials.

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Never mind the federal Privacy Protection Act shields journalists from overly intrusive government searches of newsroom offices, while the Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

The raid is particularly disturbing since the newspaper did not even publish a story based on the document it received from a confidential source. Even more appalling, law enforcement officials used a search warrant that lacked a signed affidavit spelling out the probable cause for the raid — as required by law — the Record reported.

Just as troubling, this was not a one-off confrontation between local law enforcement and a small-town newspaper. The inexcusable tactics employed by police in Kansas are part of a broader pattern of attacks on the press in recent years intended to undermine democracy.

A sheriff in Oklahoma was caught on tape earlier this year discussing ways to murder reporters (and lynching Black residents). A government official in Las Vegas was charged last year with murdering an investigative reporter who wrote stories about his bullying tactics of subordinates and his relationship with an employee. The homes of two journalists in New Hampshire were vandalized last year after stories detailed sexual assault allegations against the operator of an addiction treatment center.

Reporters were also threatened and harassed for covering the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Some local governments have stopped paying to print public notices in newspapers because of unfavorable coverage. Elon Musk banned several reporters from Twitter who aggressively covered his social media company.

The increased incidents coincide with the political rise of Donald Trump, the twice-impeached and quarce-indicted former president who issued thousands of tweets attacking the media during his one term in office and declared the press the “enemy of the people,” invoking a phrase often used by dictators such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

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Censorship, repression, and violence against the media have been on the rise around the globe, while public trust in the media here has fallen. To be sure, the mainstream media is not perfect, but it plays an important role in shining a light on wrongdoing and holding government officials accountable to the public.

Indeed, the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment forms the bedrock of our democracy. That’s why the abuse by the police in Kansas is not just an assault on one small newspaper — it is an attack on everyone’s constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Such attacks must be met with the strongest pushback and accountability before they become an accepted tactic when the powerful want to enforce silence.