Kansas cops raid Marion County Record newspaper office, seize records, injure reporter
A reporter’s finger was injured when a cop grabbed her cell phone out of her hand.
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” in the Friday raid, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, Eric Meyer told the Kansas Reflector.
Meyer said the police took action because a confidential source leaked sensitive information about a local restaurant owner, who allegedly took offense.
Meyer said the message to his newspaper was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”The raid came after news reports about the Marion restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner.
The stories included revelations about her apparent lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving, the Reflector reported.
Meyer spent 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal and 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois and said he’d never heard of the police raiding a newspaper.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, seems to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists, the Kansas Reflector reported.
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