The Raid
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On August 11th, 2023, police arrived at the home of a man named Eric Meyer in Marion, Kansas.
I was just sitting there at the house, checking email, doing normal stuff, and they came to the door.
What did they say they wanted?
They said they were serving a warrant.
Eric Meyer is the editor and publisher of a local newspaper, the Marion County Record. Marion is a small town about an hour north of Wichita, and at the time, the paper had about 4,000 subscribers. Eric took over as editor of the newspaper in 2021 after working as a reporter and editor and as a journalism professor for decades.
This is purely a retirement gig.
When the police came to his door, Eric asked to look at their warrant. The warrant said they were searching for evidence of identity theft and, quote, unlawful acts concerning computers. At the same time, police were also searching the newspaper's office blocks away. They searched the house and the newspaper office for several hours. At least seven officers were involved in the raid, including the chief of police, a man named Gideon Cody. They eventually started taking things as evidence. Eric Meyer's laptop, a hard drive, his mother's computer, her router.
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.
Had you ever heard of the police raiding a newspaper office before?
No. No. It's unheard of. No one ever expected anything like this to ever happen.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Eric Meyer and his parents bought the Marion County Record in 1998 to keep it from being sold to a newspaper chain. His father had worked at the paper since 1948 as an editor, and his mother was a columnist and editor. Eric started working at the paper when he was a kid.
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.
And what does the paper typically cover?
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.
That includes reporting on local police.
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.
When Gideon Cody was sworn in as the new police chief of Marion, the record covered it, writing that he would make $60,000 a year as police chief and that he was one of three candidates who'd interviewed for the position. Before that, he'd been working as a police captain in Kansas City.
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