The inside story of the events leading to the police raid on the Marion County Record, according to Editor Eric Meyer, Chief Gideon Cody and others.
The office of the Marion County Record, in Marion, Kan., on Aug. 21, 2023. Police raided it Aug. 11. Photo for The Washington Post by Chase Castor.
Gruver wouldn’t publish any of her reporting on Cody for months to come. But their confrontation in April marked an escalation in long-running tensions between a group of local journalists and the officials and community members they cover that would boil over through the summer.The small-town intrigue might have stayed in a small town, though, had Cody not initiated a dramatic step earlier this month.
“Get out of my house!” Joan Meyer had shouted at Cody from behind her walker before calling him an expletive, home surveillance video revealed. “Don’t you touch any of that stuff!” It’s the town where Eric Meyer, 70, grew up in a family of dedicated journalists - his late father, Bill Meyer, a Record staffer from 1948 onward, and his mother, Joan, a copy editor and longtime columnist, who bought the paper in 1998. And it’s the town to which Eric Meyer chose to return to take over the family business during the pandemic after a long career as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and a journalism professor at the University of Illinois.
“People think things are emphasized [by the paper] from a certain perspective,” said Aleen Ratzlaff, a professor of communications at Tabor College in neighboring Hillsboro. “When there is an issue, they’re pretty aggressive about finding some news.”One controversy occurred in June 2020, before Eric Meyer took over as editor, when the Record reported on the death of a teenager who was hit by a grain truck while riding his bike.
The Record reported that the fired city administrator had been accused of misconduct after showing a woman’s provocative old modeling shots to another city official. The story included the identity of the woman in the photos: the day spa owner. It was an unnecessary detail, Newell told The Post.Meyer defended the paper’s coverage of the spa.
With several county commissioners present, it should have counted as an open meeting, the Record journalists believed - but when Meyer walked in with one of his reporters, Phyllis Zorn, Newell asked Cody, the police chief, to tell them to leave. This month, after the national spotlight cast its glare on Marion, Cody acknowledged in an interview that he had been facing discipline and demotion when he ended his 24-year career with the Kansas City department, resigning from his role as captain in April to take a job paying barely half as much as a small-town chief. The Kansas City Star reported that he had been accused of berating a female officer with insulting comments.
Once again, the Record decided against publishing a story - just as it had taken a pass on the murky accusations about Cody last spring. Meyer said he was uneasy with how the newspaper’s original tipster had obtained Newell’s record. Instead, he said, he privately let the police chief know that he had received some information about Newell that the original sources may have accessed illicitly. He said he also volunteered to the chief his suspicion that Newell had been driving without a license.
Cody quickly took up the issue - but not in the way Meyer hoped. Three days later, the chief’s name and signature appeared on applications for warrants to search the Record’s office and the homes of Meyer, the councilwoman and another person who allegedly shared the Newell document. Cody argued in an affidavit viewed later by The Post that the Record could not have gotten Newell’s records without “either impersonating [Newell] or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer told the Reflector in the hours after the raid, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.” “We wanted to articulate just how extraordinary and significant this was,” Rottman explained, “not just in Marion but for all of the news media.”
“The allegations [about Cody] - including the identities of who made the allegations - were on one of the computers that got seized,” he told Kabas. “I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.” “There’s no way someone can conduct a search warrant on their own without going through our series of checks and balances,” Cody said.
Downtown Marion, Kan., on Aug. 21, 2023. The home of the Marion County Record has 1,900 residents. Photo for The Washington Post by Chase Castor.As for the Record, the newspaper took no small measure of relief and vindication when Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey announced five days after the raid that he would withdraw Cody’s warrant and return the seized items to Meyer and his staff.
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