One year after newspaper raid, KU journalism professor can discuss chilling effect, influence on rural journalists

LAWRENCE — Nearly one year ago, police raided a small-town Kansas newsroom to execute a search warrant and made international headlines. As the Aug. 11 anniversary of the raid of the Marion County Record in Marion approaches, the official investigation report for the incident is pending and lawsuits are being reviewed, even after the initial search warrant was dropped. 

A University of Kansas journalism faculty member has conducted research about the raid and its effects on small-town journalism and is available to discuss the raid, its aftermath, the First Amendment, legal protections for journalists and related topics with the media.

Stephen Wolgast, Knight Chair in Audience and Community Engagement at KU’s William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications, closely followed the raid and co-led a study with Kansas journalists about the raid's effects.

“There is a lot of interest around this because it was so out of the blue,” Wolgast said. “As far as we know, it hasn’t happened in Kansas ever before this and rarely happens in the United States. You just don’t see law enforcement raiding newspapers and taking away hard drives.”

The raid came after the Marion County Record received a tip that a local restaurateur was driving on a suspended license following previous DUI convictions. A reporter accessed public files to investigate the tip, but a story was never published. Shortly thereafter, the Marion police, with the help of the sheriff and a fire marshal, executed a search warrant on the paper’s offices and publisher Eric Meyer’s home. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother was at home at the time of the search, and the stress of the event was a factor that led to her death the following day, the coroner said.

Wolgast said the Colorado Bureau of Investigation led a formal review of the raid after it was revealed the Kansas Bureau of Investigation knew about the planned search prior to its execution. The CBI has presented its findings to Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s office, which has yet to act on it. In the meantime, Wolgast and Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri have conducted a study to gauge the event’s effects on Kansas journalists.

With independent researcher Deborah Dwyer, they interviewed 18 Kansas journalists who held positions including editor, manager, publisher, owner, reporter and desk editor. They were asked four primary questions.

• What were their personal and professional responses to the raid?
• How, if at all, did the raid change how journalists approach their work?
• What changes, if any, have newsrooms implemented in reaction to the raid?
• What resources could journalists use to better protect themselves?

Several respondents said the raid had a chilling effect on their work. While about half of respondents said it didn’t change how they work, others made statements including “there’s a sense that if they can get away with this, it’ll be open season on all of us,” referring to raids on journalists. Another commented that their publication could not afford to fight such an action in the courts.

“It suggests to me some degree of reporting less aggressively than they otherwise might,” Wolgast said of the responses.

The respondents who said the raid did not change how they approach their work often stated that they have good relationships with their local law enforcement and government agencies. They also commonly said they did not make any changes in their newsrooms and even reported that many in their communities, including law enforcement and people of all political persuasions, coming together to support their newspapers and voicing displeasure at what they saw as government overreach in the raid.

When asked what resources they could use to protect themselves, several respondents reported they were unaware that Kansas has a shield law until the raid happened. They were also unaware of federal protections under the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 and said they either had received or would be interested in training from organizations like the Kansas Press Association on such protections. Others expressed concerns about their home offices being raided.

“Something we didn’t think about in advance was reporters who work from home,” Wolgast said. “They said, ‘If I’m working from home and a search warrant is executed on my newsroom, they could execute it on my home and phone.’ They asked if there was some way to protect themselves from that.”

Wolgast and Mathews will present the initial findings of their research at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications conference Aug. 10 in Philadelphia, the day before the raid’s anniversary. They continue to follow the case and will publish more of their findings in the future. They also hope to study similar press freedom cases in Mississippi, where the governor is suing a publication for defamation, and in Alabama, where a reporter and her publisher were arrested after receiving leaked grand jury testimony.