The apple and the serpent: Why Kansas newspaper raid is so dangerous | Opinion
Much has been said after the entire police force of a small town in Kansas raided the local weekly newspaper office and seized computers and other equipment.
We could never say enough about it.
The first thing every dictator does after choking freedom from the people is to kill the free press.
Our nation should be trembling at the acts of China, Russia and Cuba that took place in Marion, Kansas, last week.
Legions of Americans have given their lives to keep it from happening here.
An aspect of this sad episode that resonated with me, a pastured marsh tacky from decades of work at a community newspaper, is how the tiny staff of the Marion County Record did what we always do: They got the paper out.
Cops had hauled away everything they needed to put the paper together. So they started from scratch. They retyped the classifieds, pieced together ads from memory, rewrote the stories – and finished the marathon at 5 a.m. There’s nothing like that feeling.
When the jackboots from the police station bullied the little paper, they had no concept of that feeling, or how deeply they offended this nation.
Newspaper people – and authors and podcasters and magazine writers who dig at the truth to tell a story – aren’t doing it for fame and fortune.
A great newspaper heroine of my time, reporter and columnist Celestine Sibley of the Atlanta Constitution, is a perfect example.
“From 1930 to 1999, Sibley had spent the bulk of her waking hours in a newsroom, surrounded by similarly afflicted adrenaline addicts with body clocks all ticking toward the same daily deadline,” wrote Richard L. Eldredge in the introduction to a 2001 book highlighting her best work from grisly murder trials to chicanery at the Capitol: “Celestine Sibley Reporter.”
After nearly 60 years as a Constitution and Atlanta institution, Sibley said:
“Being a reporter is one of the noblest things you can do in life. Letting the people know. It’s really a holy cause. Time after time after time, in the middle of corruption and disgrace and bad politics, I’ve seen people come through and do for people. I write about someone in trouble and someone else rallies to help them. Through reporting, things can change.”
Authoritarians, jackboots, and good-old-boys don’t want change.
Jonathan Daniels had lived a full life as a political adviser on the national stage, author and editor of his family’s News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he and his wife, Lucy, found Hilton Head Island to be their “hideaway” in the 1960s.
He knew the role of the Fourth Estate so well the folks of North Carolina called his paper “The Nuisance and Disturber.”
But there’s more to it than that, as he told a convention of newspaper advertising executives on Hilton Head in 1972, two years after he and Lucy co-founded The Island Packet.
The Packet was “launched in the shallow waters of one 10-by-12 rented room,” Daniels told them. “Its typos were triumphant and its lines ended in wild hyphenation. It set sail, as we said at the time, with a shoestring for a sail.”
Daniels, who was press secretary to FDR on the day the president died, was asked to outline the little paper’s policy. It reflects the freedom to engage in give-and-take, which the jackboots of Kansas and across the globe detest.
“A magic island must be concerned with the cocklebur as well as the camellia, the apple as well as the serpent,” Daniels said.
He closed with an aspect of press freedom that makes the assault in Kansas so maddening.
The best journalism doesn’t depend on the latest technology of delivery, he said.
“It depends upon love for the metropolises or the parishes it serves, a desire to keep them beautiful and good, an eagerness to protect, a firm faith in their potential. True love does not always run smooth; true journalism can never be merely bland.
“But it must be a joyous, if sometimes tempestuous, relationship.”
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
