Why The KC Star and Wichita Eagle denounced Kansas newspaper police raid together | Opinion
You may have read an editorial on these pages this past weekend about a police raid:
“Raid on Kansas newspaper is an intolerable overreach by police.”
And then, you might have noticed the author: By The Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star Editorial Boards.
Yes, that editorial came from both editorial staffs of the Kansas and Missouri news outlets. We are two entities, both part of the McClatchy publishing company, that came together to tell an important story. Unusual?
The Star doesn’t do this very often, but we have done it before, and when we collaborate to run a joint editorial, it usually signifies an important moment in news history. I’m writing about this today because any time I get a chance to speak about transparency — why we do what we do — I’ll take it.
The last time The Star ran an editorial with a colleague news outlet, it was in 2017 with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is owned by Lee Enterprises. “A call for transparency — Eric Greitens still governing in the dark” was about then-Missouri Gov. Greitens collaborating in the creation of a bogus nonprofit designed to share propaganda about the governor’s political stances.
Both news outlets felt so strongly about our state leader’s participation in this, we came together to do so. We called the nonprofit “an insult to Missouri voters.” We also explained why we treated this editorial so uniquely:
“We feel so strongly about the governor’s lack of transparency and repeated attempts to evade the Missouri news media that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Kansas City Star are publishing this joint editorial, hoping Greitens will change course.”
This time, the story was about the Marion, Kansas, police and the Marion County sheriff’s office conducting a raid on the offices of the Marion County Record and the home of its owners, Eric Meyer and his 98-year-old mother, Joan. Even worse, Mrs. Meyer died the next day, apparently from the stress of the situation.
We were shocked with outrage upon hearing the news and set out to criticize the police actions while asking for swift follow-up from the state legislative and judicial levels.
We ended the editorial with a promise: “In the meantime, The Wichita Eagle and The Kansas City Star stand ready to assist the Record in any way we can.”
A police raid on a newspaper is unusual. I have known police to raid college newspaper offices (a guest columnist discusses this topic) but rarely a professional shop. It calls to question First Amendment rights. A Google search yielded just one other raid, in 2009, when New York City police raided several newspapers as part of a union corruption probe. But that was not about news coverage.
Sometimes a story is so important that we set aside our competitive nature, our quest to be first.
When The Washington Post collaborated with The Las Vegas Review-Journal on a murder investigation last September, Review-Journal Executive Editor Glenn Cook told PBS NewsHour: “Our industry is an incredibly competitive one. Everyone’s competing for readership, for audience. But, at the same time, nothing brings our industry together like fighting for press freedoms, the First Amendment, ensuring that important stories can be told everywhere, not just in certain places.”
The First Amendment is not a dusty piece of paper from 1791 cared about just by news nerds. Its five promises of freedoms (speech, press, religion, petition of the government and peaceful assembly) affect you, too. In this case, the raid sent a chilling message to reporters and their sources. We must fight back against — to use Mrs. Meyer’s word — “Hitler tactics.”
And we will combine forces when we need to, working together to shine light into the darkness.
