Editor of Marion County Record discusses possible motives behind police raid of newsroom

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Police officers in Marion, Kansas, are facing scrutiny after raiding the newsroom of the town's local newspaper.

  As William Brangham reports, press freedom advocates say it's a clear violation of the First Amendment.

• William Brangham:

  Geoff, Marion, Kansas is a town of roughly 2,000. Its paper, The Marion County Record, has five full-time employees.

  On Friday, as you can see in this video, police raided the newsroom, took photos and confiscated computers, cell phones and other materials. Police say they executed the search warrant as part of an identity theft investigation. But the newspaper has rejected that accusation.

  The newspaper's publisher and editor said that his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, collapsed and died following a separate raid on the house that they shared. She was co-owner of the paper.

  Eric Meyer is the publisher and editor of The Marion County Record, and he joins us now.

  Eric, I'm terribly sorry about your mother's passing and this whole ordeal.

  And I just wonder how — how are you holding up? How your colleagues holding up?

  Eric Meyer, Publisher and Editor, The Marion County Record: I will be honest with you.

  The shock of the raid and all of the attention it's received afterward really hasn't left me almost any time to reflect on my mother's death. So it's pushed it off a little bit.

• William Brangham:

  I mean, the details of this case are complicated, that a local restaurant owner alleges that someone at your paper illegally obtained personal damaging information about her about a previous drunk driving case.

  She went to the police, the police got the warrant, and they executed that warrant. Is that true? Did anyone at the newspaper illegally obtain this information?

• Eric Meyer:

  Not illegally.

  But what really happened was a source sent us that information. We were worried whether it was authentic and attempted to verify that it is factual information. We then informed the police that we had — that the source had sent us this thing, because it was possible that the source had obtained it from police records, rather than where she said she did.

  We notified the police of that Friday before the raids. A week later, they did not ask any question. We offered at the time, if you think there's a case you want to pursue, we will give you any more information you want. That didn't — they didn't talk to us, didn't say a word to us until they showed up at our doors on the following Friday morning.

• William Brangham:

  I mean, more than 30 news and press freedom organizations, as you know, have condemned this raid, arguing — quote — "that there appears to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of this search."

  You have suggested that the extremity of this action was partly because of your other reporting about local officials. Can you explain what you mean?

• Eric Meyer:

  Well, this is, as with most small towns, a very divided community in some regards. And it's more so than others.

  There's also other stories we have been pursuing, including stories we haven't published, because we haven't found enough support for them. But we were doing investigation into the chief of police, for example. We — his background. We did some work about his budget and how we didn't quite make sense of that.

  So there are other things that we have done reporting on that maybe they took that. We have some suspicion to believe that. The document itself, the one that was obtained, that they say we stole the identity of, a copy of it was sitting on my desk right next to my computer, and they didn't seize it. They didn't find any copies that we had downloaded and printed, because we didn't print them.

  We just looked to see if this the same document that we'd seen shown up. That's not criminal intent.

• William Brangham:

  So, are you planning on taking legal action against the police force for this raid?

• Eric Meyer:

  Well, we obviously want our equipment back, and we'd like to have it back sooner, rather than later, because we're struggling right now to publish this week's paper.

  But the bigger issue is, this kind of stuff can't stand. We can't allow police to come running through newsrooms and seizing things and looking. And there's nobody watching the police at this point.

• William Brangham:

  Your mother, as you mentioned, she was co-owner of the paper.

  And in an article this weekend about her passing, the first sentence reads that she was — quote — "stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by shock and grief."

  Do you really believe that this event is what precipitated the end of her life?

• Eric Meyer:

  Contributed. I don't know that it caused it entirely.

  But it's not only I believe that. The coroner who handled her case, and who was her family physician for many years, thinks so too. She was so distraught. When you're 98 years old, your world shrinks a bit. She lived in that house for almost 70 years. It was her castle. It was her safe place.

  To have police officers come and stand and watch her for two hours waiting for other officers to come and search her material, because we had to conduct these raids as if it was against some Medellin drug cartel, simultaneous raids at three locations, and so on and so forth.

  The officers there were nice, the ones that were there initially, but then when seven of them descended on her house, she just sat most of the evening: Where are all the good people? Where are all the good people? And how come they haven't done something about this? Why are they allowed to do this?

  She worked at the newspaper for 50 years. We bought it 25 years ago. My parents and I jointly bought it 25 years ago to keep it from going under chain ownership, the great part of her life, the dedication to the community and the dedication to community journalism that said, hey, you can make more money buying something, buying stock or something like that, rather than buying a newspaper company.

  But we wanted to do it because it benefits the community. And this is like the whole — everything — your back was turned on. So, the last 24 hours of a 98-year-old woman's life was devoted to pain and anguish and a feeling that all her life didn't matter.

  I think, if she were alive today, she'd be pleased that her death has brought some attention to this story, and in a positive way. But she's not alive now. And who do you see about that?

• William Brangham:

  Eric Meyer, publisher and editor of The Marion County Record, I'm very, very sorry for your loss. And I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

• Eric Meyer:

  Thank you, William.