The Fight Against Authoritarian Creep Gets Great News From an Unlikely State

[marmar]

(Slate) Since Donald Trump began his second term as president this year, we’ve been collectively watching in horror as major institutions either fall over themselves to conform to his agenda or simply give up fighting against it. It’s spreading the aura of authoritarianism all across the country. There was one major bright spot in the battle against authoritarian creep this week, however, in Marion, Kansas. The city is home to the Marion County Record, a tiny local newspaper that two years ago was subject to an unlawful raid for its coverage, an assault that seems to have left one elderly woman dead and, on a national level, coalesced media companies to publicly support the paper’s First Amendment right. On Wednesday, the Record received a $3 million payout, topped with a written apology admitting local officials’ wrongdoing.

“These days, there’s an awful lot of people who get abused, get treated by the bully of government officials, and they just kind of roll over and go off into a corner somewhere,” Eric Meyer, the editor and publisher of the Record, told WBUR this week. “But the press is supposed to be a watchdog, and if you attack the watchdog and the watchdog rolls over, it isn’t much of a watchdog anymore.”

Meyer owns and operates the Record, managing a staff of only seven that reports on the comings and goings of the city of Marion’s 1,900 or so residents. Two years ago, the small-town paper found itself at the center of a bizarre local political drama that led to Meyer’s home, along with his newspaper’s office, being raided by law enforcement. It all started when the Record received an anonymous tip through social media about a local restaurateur, Kari Newell. According to the tipster, Newell had multiple charges of drunk driving on her record and had been using an expired license for the past 20 years, a fact law enforcement had willfully been ignoring. The information was shared right as Newell was in the process of securing a liquor license for her restaurant.

As the article detailed at the time, the source seemed suspect, as he also “bragged about retaining ‘connections’ despite no longer working in law enforcement.” But, doing due diligence, the journalist who wrote the piece consulted public records and confirmed that Newell indeed had a drunk-driving conviction. The paper declined to publish any of this information after learning that the anonymous source was likely Newell’s estranged husband and that the couple were in the midst of divorce proceedings. ........................(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/trump-authoritarian-creep-marion-county-kansas-free-speech.html

[wcmagumba]

1. Great job, I used to live and work in Marion and loved it...