Eric Meyer
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Eric Meyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Why would somebody fake cancer?
I was just sitting there at the house, checking email, doing normal stuff, and they came to the door.
They said they were serving a warrant.
This is purely a retirement gig.
Down at the office, they took the reporters' cell phones or personal cell phones and all the computers that we used in the news operation, along with our file server, along with our backup drives. They'd been bragging around to other officers that this was going to be the biggest raid in the history of Marion County. They brought every officer they'd had. They even brought extra on.
They brought a state fire marshal to come in as extra help to do the raiding.
No. No. It's unheard of. No one ever expected anything like this to ever happen.
I started doing menial things like stapling. We had a job printing operation and I would staple and trim things. And then I was about sixth or seventh grade, I started developing all the pictures and making all the... In those days, we had to make engravings of pictures. I did that all through high school. I became the vacation relief for my parents.
And actually, my grandmother, who had retired from the Wichita Eagle, was also working there. So I guess this is a family retirement thing.
Everything local. If it happens in Marion County, we cover it. So anything that happens from, you know, cars hitting deer – chicken dinner type stuff, the honor roll at the schools, everything that happens in local government.
We've tried to be aggressive at this. There was a time when this was sort of, oh, boosterism, cheerleading for the community. But we've tried to do a different approach and really bring serious journalism to the newspaper.
soon as he was appointed was we started hearing from people he had worked with. We had numerous sources, more than a dozen sources, telling us that he was in trouble in Kansas City. He was about to be demoted.
Oh, yes. He knew and threatened to sue us if we ran it. I regret now that we didn't. We didn't have a document. We didn't have a named source. We had multiple sources, and some people would say that's enough to go on, but we were wanting to get something that was on the record, and he had been threatening us with a defamation suit if we ran it.
She ordered Gideon Cody to come over and throw us out, saying she didn't want us there. She reserved the right to refuse service to anyone. Why didn't she want you there? She didn't like the media, she said. She later said it was just us, not the media. But at the time, she said no media allowed. We were the only media that were there and had us thrown out.
We received this tip that said that, you know, that Carrie Newell has been driving illegally for almost 20 years.
So we got it, and we verified that it was, in fact, a legitimate document. And then we decided whether we were going to use it or not.
We decided we didn't want to get in the middle of a divorce. But we were a little concerned if the police were aware of this and not enforcing the law. So I wrote a letter to the police chief and to the sheriff saying, we got this document. We verified it's true. We don't plan to use it in any way, shape, or form.
But you should be aware that there's an allegation that officers are ignoring this and allowing her to drive.
The city administrator said in response to that, we're not going to investigate this at all. It's up to the state to worry about liquor licenses. The city police department's going to do nothing with this story. That was Friday. Somewhere Monday morning following that, someone changed their mind.
And I got up afterward and said, no, that is not what happened. I will tell you that it was material that was provided to us and we chose not to disseminate it any further.
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