On Press Freedoms - Editorial
“It’s happening to you now…death by a thousand cuts.”
This was the reaction of Maria Ressa, the Filipina journalist who received the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for defending press freedoms against her country’s authoritarian regime, in response to recent news of the police raid on a Kansas newspaper.
Last Friday, August 11, the entire five-person police department of Marion, Kansas, along with two sheriff’s deputies, raided the offices of the Marion County Record, the local newspaper; and the homes of its publisher Eric Meyer and a local councilwoman.
Officers seized servers, computers and the cellphones of the paper’s reporters and editors, a rare and invasive move that defies the typical process of serving a subpoena.
The newspaper’s publisher, Mr. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother Joann Meyer, was at the residence when it was raided. She collapsed and died the next day. The raid appears to have been precipitated by the newspaper’s investigation into a tip regarding a local restaurateur’s legal troubles.
This deeply troubling overreach by public officials follows a pattern of aggressive offenses against free speech and attempts to silence free press in this country.
We condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.
Ms. Ressa’s reaction resonates—we saw it shared online by Dan Kennedy who, fittingly, created the annual feature “The New England Muzzle Awards” in 1998 to highlight outrages against free speech in the region. New England or not, Marion County looks like a shoo-in for the next roundup.
Attacks on the press seem to be happening more frequently in recent years. From unprecedented levels of journalists being arrested while covering stories, to the murder of four journalists and a sales associate at the Capital Gazette—a small publication in Maryland not too unlike the Enterprise—at the hands of a disgruntled resident who did not like the paper’s coverage of his arrests, and the on-air murders of television reporters, it has begun to feel like a uniquely dangerous time to be a member of the press.
The legal basis of the raid in Marion County is murky at best and changing fast—recent revelations point to more sinister motives, and a county prosecutor withdrew the search warrant and ordered the return of all materials on Wednesday. But any attack on a free press must not be ignored, and especially not in a country that has enshrined the right to a free press in its own Constitution.
Had the eyes of the nation not turned to Marion, the actions of its police department would have effectively shuttered a newspaper and silenced reporters. We cannot stop watching now; we must demand answers.
It is vital to democracy to have an informed citizenry bolstered by a free press, and a free press protected by an informed citizenry. An attack on the free press is an attack on democracy itself, and this latest brazen offense should be a clarion call for all of us.