Page 70 - Eric Meyer News Today

Last Friday's police raid on the Marion County Record has thrown the 154-year-old weekly into the center of a First Amendment firestorm.

It was the sort of conduct one usually associates with totalitarian governments: Law enforcement officers swarm a newspaper office and confiscate computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. Yet this raid took place not in a faraway autocracy, but in a small town in Kansas, despite a federal law prohibiting such searches in most cases.

Police raiding a Kansas newspaper reinforces how fragile our freedoms can be,

Local news organizations are in crisis, and courts need to protect their constitutional freedom to report the news.

Experts say a central Kansas police chief was on legally shaky ground when he ordered the raid of a weekly newspaper.

The raid brought international attention to the newspaper and the small town of 1,900 — foisted to the center

Former University of Illinois journalism Professor Eric Meyer already knew tiny communities aren’t duplicates of the fictional TV town of Mayberry.

It’s no trade secret that newspapers these days — especially small, hyper-local papers — are having a hard enough time doing their work while making ends meet.

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Opinion column on police raid in Kansas says such raids could happen in South Carolina, where in many towns, public officials dont like questions.