In Small-town Kansas, this is what the First Amendment looks like, The Washington Post, August 20, 2023,
With a population of just under 2,000, Marion is a common Kansas town with something that is increasingly uncommon among rural communities, a still-operating weekly newspaper. The red brick office of the Marion County Record stands across the street from the County District Courthouse, a visual reminder of the newspaper’s role as a government watchdog. The paper has served the community since 1869.
Above the front entrance is the paper’s masthead logo: an American Flag over an outline of Marion County. In front, there’s a red newspaper stand, but townspeople are more likely to walk in and buy their copies from the front desk, where a jar sits next to the latest edition, collecting the dollar fee that folks leave behind as they help themselves to a paper off the stack.
The twenty-year fall of local journalism has been precipitous – a source of heartbreak and concern for many, including me. I’ve spent two years photographing newspaper offices across my home state. In Marion, these concerns – about community, division, democracy, and first amendment rights – have collided this week. This small town and its paper should be an inspiration and a warning.
Eric Meyer, the Record’s newspaper’s editor, taught journalism at the University of Illinois until returning to his hometown of Marion during the covid pandemic, when he stepped in to help at his family-owned newspaper and care for his elderly mother.
“My father started working for the Marion County Record right after graduating from college at the end of World War II. He ran the paper for 20 years and worked there nearly 50. The Record always was a family operation.”
When his father was 73, they initially considered selling the paper. The most likely purchaser was a chain that eventually morphed into Gatehouse Gannett. When they saw what had happened to other papers absorbed by the company, his family decided to preserve local ownership.
“We’re proud of the fact that we have more reporters — and probably fewer salespeople — than most of the newspapers around.”
Eric eventually retired from the university and took helm of the Record in 2021, though as editor, he doesn’t collect a salary. “Because I don’t need the paper, I can do things the way I think they should be done. That’s important to me.”
This allows The Record a certain amount of freedom but is certainly not a model most can follow. They, and rural newspapers nationwide, try to carve a difficult path forward in a landscape where the funding structure for newspapers has largely collapsed, and fewer people read or engage in the civic life of a community.
Eric’s shrewd approach is informed by his long-time involvement with the family business, his previous employment with the Milwaukee Journal, and his teaching career.
“We don’t do social media. We don’t do video. We don’t blog. We don’t have an app. We do have a website, which has had a subscription model since 2002 and probably accounts for most of our audience. But will still print. And we care about what we print. We’ve hired reporters with decades of higher-level experience. We’ve changed our advertising focus from retail, which is in sharp decline in rural areas, to institutional. And, after watching editorial pages dwindle, we’ve become extremely aggressive and trying to model leadership ability over local issues in a community that over the years has seen its leadership ranks dwindle as more and more businesses close or become branches of mega-corporations.”
Among Eric’s mantras to students was to take risks journalistically. Such risks have at times put the newspaper at odds with members of the community who fear aggressive news coverage portrays the town in a negative light.
William Allen White, former editor and owner of the Emporia Gazette and Kansas’s most celebrated journalist, often stirred-up his small community with his writing. Perhaps his most famous editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas”, published in 1896, was syndicated nationally. White was once asked what was the “best American trait?” He answered, “intelligent discontent”. (*(Rages and Exuberances of William Allen White, NYT, April 25, 1937.
Perhaps this describes Eric’s editorial stance, but citizens’ occasional displeasure of reporting in the rural community likely reflects his rare position to embody the ideals of the free press. “Trying to become a leader instead of a follower always exposes you to sniping, both from within the industry and within the community. But when your livelihood doesn’t depend on it, you aren’t as tempted to give in to pressures of conformity and hopefully can show that keeping the focus on quality will pay off in the end.”
Inside the Records office, the front page of a past edition of the paper rests against a wall mounted to foam core. Headlines include “Snakebit: Dad-daughter trip nearly a disaster” and shows a young girl’s ankle and toes which had been bit, along with notations drawn onto her skin by doctors. An adjacent image shows a toddler with her tongue sticking out for the page 7 story, “Y is for… Yoga and its newest young fans.” Below is a large, close-up photo of a mountain lion, its teeth exposed and paw reaching towards the camera which appears only inches away. The image’s tight crop is disorienting and illustrates a story about the sale of a gun and taxidermy collection. The fierce predator appears to be lunging down, where, within the grasp of its pointed claws is the arrest photo of a 55-year-old man convicted of raping a 9-year-old girl. The story exposes the leniency granted the felon who received less than nine years in prison.
The jarring collection of stories reminds readers small towns are not always bucolic. Whether featuring the minutia of smalltown life or reporting on the issues that affect the livelihoods of its citizens, The Marion County Record is an invaluable resource to Marion.
“I care about this community and about making sure it has access to information it can rely upon in making informed decisions about moving forward. Such information depends on a watchdog press that doesn’t kowtow to economic or political powers-that-be.”
What happens to a democracy without a free press? On Friday, August 11th, law enforcement officers raided the office of the Marion County Record, as well as the homes of its editor, owners, and reporters, seizing computer equipment, routers, and cellphones – the dystopian fallout following a congressman’s visit and the ejection of Eric and one of his news reporters from the community meeting, held at a restaurant whose owner sought to ban the press from covering the event.
The heated rhetoric of the moment which seemed fanned by national right-wing hyperbole that the press is the “enemy of the people,” morphed into a series of events that brought gestapo tactics to the Midwestern town. Video surveillance footage reveals multiple police officers searching the small office as if it were the scene of a crime and carrying away property which they presumably knew would interfere with publishing of the paper. Their actions, however, were criminal, and in direct violation of the Privacy Protection Act meant to safeguard the press.
Eric believes the paper’s coverage of local politics and investigation into allegations of abuse by Marion police chief were the cause of the raid.
Commenting on the raid, in the Kansas Reflector Eric Meyer said, “I didn’t think it could happen in America.”
Eric’s mother, Joan Meyer, co-owner of the paper, died the day after police raided her home.
In subsequent days, a sign announcing Joan’s memorial service to be held the Saturday following her passing was posted to the Jost Funeral Home sign board on Main Street. Directly across the road, a hand-painted “Support the Blue” sign was taped to a local business window. A block away, another “Support the Blue” sign went up, each letter drawn onto a sheet of paper.
Though not presently an electoral swing state, Kansas has been on the front lines of cultural battles being waged in the country. Following the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V. Wade, Kansas became the first state to push back by voting overwhelmingly to protect a woman’s right to choose in the state constitution.
“Kansas is the spotlight of America. Her pioneer editors kindled a beacon which flames across the sky to this hour.”
Writing in his 1916 book “The History of Kansas Newspapers” William Connelley offered a first-person account of Kansas newspapers dating back to 1854, the territorial days when battles were waged to determine if Kansas would be a slave or free state. The decision would tip the Union in either direction ultimately leading to the Civil War. The history of the Kansas press, the book argues, is tied to the fact the state was founded on the ideal that all men should be free.
“From the first Kansas regarded the press as her supreme asset. In no other state was the press, as a whole, ever equal to that of Kansas in either ability or enterprise. This high standard was set up in the stirring territorial period when Kansas was battling for freedom for herself and liberty for America.”
Before statehood, some of the country’s brightest minds: editors, preachers, abolitionists, came to Kansas Territory to fight for this freedom. Some came with guns and ammo, but their most powerful weapon was the press. By the time Kansas’s admission to the Union on January 29, 1861, there were twenty-two newspapers operating in the territory. By the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, there were thirty-seven papers in Kansas, the same number that existed in the whole country when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. John James Ingalls, who is said to have coined the state motto Ad Astra Per Aspera became one of the first state senators and editor of the Atchinson newspaper, Freedom’s Champion. By the time of his death in 1900, there were over 500 newspapers in the state.
Today, in contrast to much of the country, newspapers are still operating in towns nearly every 20 to 30 miles across the Kansas prairie.
On the faded stucco wall of the Record’s office, framed by maroon blinds, hangs a relief of the Kansas state seal with the motto, Ad Astra Per Aspera (To the stars through difficulty).