Threats to independent reporting on the government come most famously from Donald Trump, in screeds about punishing journalists and news organizations.
The recent decision by ABC News to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump is a prominent example.
Far from Washington, D.C., though, journalists are being harassed by officials closer to home, where the reporters are the readers’ neighbors or customers.
In Alabama, a reporter and his editor were arrested in October 2023 for publishing a tip about a grand jury’s deliberations, a right protected by the First Amendment. Charges against them weren’t dropped for six months.
In Missouri, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch alerted a state agency in 2021 that its website could reveal teachers’ Social Security numbers.
Gov. Mike Parson — falsely and nonsensically — instructed a prosecutor to investigate the reporter for hacking, but the prosecutor brought no charge.
And in Marion, Kansas, police raided the office of the Marion County Record and the home of its editor in August 2023 after he gave information to the police about a local restaurateur who was seeking a liquor license, despite her suspended driver’s license stemming from a 2008 DUI conviction.
Then-Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody convinced himself that the information the Record provided must have been illegally obtained, and he sought search warrants to gather evidence he believed would prove that an array of crimes, including identity theft, had been committed.
A judge approved Cody’s warrants, and he led raids to seize computers and other documents from the newsroom and the home of its editor, Eric Meyer, and his 98-year-old mother, Joan, who was a co-owner of the paper. She died the next day.
In less than a week, the county attorney withdrew the search warrants, and a judge ordered the police to return the Record’s property.
The story doesn’t end there. The city and county now find themselves as defendants in five civil suits, and Cody has been charged with a felony for obstructing justice because he recorded himself instructing the restaurateur to delete text messages that the two of them had sent to each other about the raids.
But no one was charged for the raids themselves.
In a report attempting to describe why no one was charged for anything related to the raids, the two special prosecutors who reviewed the investigation share results that show that Cody was unhindered by facts and untethered by law.
He acted even though the department of motor vehicles had assured him it was legal for the public to verify that the restaurateur’s driver’s license was suspended through the state’s public-facing online database.
The report, at 124 pages, points out police recordings can be used as evidence and that “an inadequate investigation,” such as in the Marion situation, can be used as a defense against claims of police misconduct.
