The sweep of a Marion, Kan., paper was nothing less than an assault on the First Amendment.
The sweep of a Marion, Kan., paper was nothing less than an assault on the First Amendment.
The small town’s police department raided the offices of the Marion County Record, the local family-owned newspaper.
It seized the paper’s computers. The chief ripped a reporter’s cellphone out of her hand, injuring her finger.
Cops even rummaged through the family’s home, snapping pictures of their bank-account information.
Then outrage turned into heartbreak. The day after she suffered the local police ransacking her newspaper and home, Joan Meyer, the 98-year-old co-owner of the Marion County Record, passed away.
What happened in Marion should make every American’s blood boil.
It is an insult to human dignity.
It is an insult to our national values.
And it is an insult to the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson explained the essence of press freedom writing to a friend in 1786: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
Securing that liberty is why James Madison enshrined press freedom in the First Amendment.
Because of the First Amendment, no public official can make journalism a crime.
Yet by all accounts, that’s exactly what Marion police and a local magistrate judge did.
And why?
A confidential source sent the Marion County Record a tip about a local woman’s criminal history, soon after the woman kicked the newspaper’s reporters out of a political event at her café.
Even then, the paper did not publish a story about the criminal history after verifying it.
