Reporters interview Eric Meyer outside of the Marion County Record office, the site of a 2023 police raid, after an Oct. 7, 2024, court hearing for Gideon Cody, the former Marion police chief who led the raid. (Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)
TOPEKA — Two years after police staged a chilling raid on the Marion County Record, the newspaper’s owner-editor remains committed to the hard-hitting journalism that made him a target.
And he wants his ongoing lawsuit against the city and county to hurt.
Eric Meyer appeared on the Kansas Reflector podcast to talk about how things have changed since the Aug. 11, 2023, raid, when police stormed the newsroom under the false pretense that a reporter had committed identity theft by looking up a driving record in a public online database. They took computers and reporters’ personal cellphones, acting outside the scope of a search warrant that was issued in disregard for the U.S. Constitution and state and federal laws that protect journalists.
The raid spawned one state and five federal lawsuits, as well as a criminal charge against Gideon Cody, the former police chief who led the raid. The legal action continues to unfold as attorneys battle in federal court and a hearing in Cody’s case is scheduled for this fall.
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Following is an edited and abbreviated Q&A from the podcast with Meyer.
How has your life changed in the past two years?
You don’t have long enough in your podcast to explain it all. It has changed massively. In addition to the practical side of it, that I’ve had a lot of places I’ve gone, a lot of speeches I’ve given, a lot of other things that have gone on, but just the work of it. You know, this was my retirement gig. I was going to come here and do this part-time for fun.
What could be more fun than this?
Well, it is fun. I at one point said that my mother, who died as a result of the stress of the raid, had an opportunity at 98 to go out meaning something in her life. But it’s nice as a retiree to be out here doing something, of still meaning it somehow or another, trying to keep trying — maybe as Don Quixote — to keep journalism alive. But we are trying our hardest to not bow to pressures and still get good journalism out there. And it really is a battle.
What are some of the revelations that have come out since we last checked in with you about this time a year ago?
Not as many as you’d think. We’re still literally blocked from discovery in our federal court lawsuits, which means we can’t go out and interrogate people that we think have information that would be relevant to the case. And part of this is being able to figure out the degree to which political people, elected officials and others, helped push this raid along.
This is important because there’s sort of been a narrative at times to pin this all on one rogue police chief, but I think the evidence clearly shows that one guy can’t do this in isolation. It was a coordinated effort.
Exactly. And I really object when that thought comes up, that this was just Gideon Cody who did this. And yeah, he did a lot of it himself. But there were people within law enforcement who helped him, people in elected positions, people in judicial court positions, who could have and should have stopped him, and they didn’t. Now, was it because they were not courageous? They didn’t want to make waves? Or was it that they agreed with him? Or was it that that they were just incompetent to what’s going on? I don’t know. That would be nice to find out.
Where do things stand in your case?
It’s abundantly clear from the rulings of the judge so far in the case on various motions of dismissal that we’ve probably won the case.
The most telling of these things was we had sued the city of Marion for failing to provide training to its police officers about the Privacy Protection Act, which says that you’re supposed to get subpoenas, not warrants, to raid newsrooms. And the judge threw that out, saying any fool who’d be a cop should know this automatically and without requiring specialized training.
And there are overtures now to try to settle — some official, some unofficial. I’m eager to get the thing done. But there are things other than financial damages at stake here. So there needs to be some admissions. There need to be things that are reported to licensing authorities for police officers other than Gideon Cody.
Are you committed to not settling, to seeing this out through trial?
The real reason we wanted to go to trial was we wanted a ruling on the record that acknowledges that this is something you just don’t do. And if they are willing to provide that as a stipulation, we might accept that. This has never been about money.
This is about making sure that people understand what they did was wrong, admit that publicly. Set it as an example. And somehow or other, it needs to hurt. One of our concerns is that they’ll want to settle up to the limit of their insurance coverage. Well, that really means you did nothing. I mean, it really probably needs to go a little beyond insurance. Now, we don’t want to bankrupt the city or county of Marion by any manner or means. But something that has a little pain to it.
Do you feel like you still have strong community support?
I think everybody, including me, would like to see this over. But they’re very supportive of us. They just don’t like the fact that it looks like we’re hickville. And to be honest, I think that’s a very unfair assumption. I think that Marion and Marion County are not hickville. Some things that went on in Marion and Marion County that probably go on in a lot of other counties have been exposed. We just don’t hear about them in other counties.
And to an extent, Marion County should take pride in the fact there here, we’ve had a situation where somebody tried to trample on rights, and it didn’t happen. We fixed it. We’re in the process of fixing it. So you can take pride in that. It’s not where cops were stupid and raided a newsroom. It’s where somebody tried something stupid and, you know what? They didn’t get away with it. I think that’s a point of pride, but it would be nice to be known for something else.
I think it’s worth pointing out that accountability journalism put you in the crosshairs of police for this raid. But this is the role that journalists need to embrace, right, in this current climate?
Oh, absolutely.
I’m sorry to tell this to a group of people out there: There are facts. And some things are facts. And your opinion of the fact doesn’t change whether it’s a fact or not. And you have to pay attention to the nuances. You have to pay attention to the little things.
You and your late mother were inducted in the Kansas Press Association Hall of Fame last year. I went to the induction ceremony, where you gave this speech, shortly after the election in November, and you gave a sort of rallying cry to journalists. You said: “Make democracy great again.” Are journalists rising to meet this moment?
Some are, when they still have money to do it. I mean, closing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to silence a great number of people in public media. Corporations are going to take care of silencing a great number of people elsewhere.
We need to have people aggressively going out and finding out what’s wrong. We had a story this week: They applied a new coating of pavement to the main road that leads to Pilsen, which is the home of Emil Kapaun, the man who’s about to be sainted as a Korean War hero. And it didn’t stick, and the road is now basically untravellable. Did they tell us about it? No! We had to find out about it. And now it’s a game of finger-pointing.
Journalists have joined this Gen Z thing: “We don’t want to embarrass anybody. Oh, my goodness, somebody might take offense if we run this story.” And so they don’t want to do it, and their corporate bosses say, “Oh yeah, they might cancel their ads. Oh, we can’t do that.” So we make our news publications and news broadcasts and other things so dull that nobody wants to read them anymore or listen to them anymore.
I used to say this as a journalism professor — that’s why I came here in my retirement, was that I think there’s still a place in this world for regular, good old-fashioned journalism. And this is from somebody who taught online and stuff like that in school. I said, “We’ve wasted too much time worrying about that stuff, and not enough time worrying about the substance of what we’re reporting. And get out there and get interesting things that matter to people and tell us about them.”
So I said, “Well, I can’t solve it for the world, but maybe I can make a little demonstration project out here that we can try to do it. And of course, somebody says, “Yeah, and what happened to you: You get raided.” Yeah, that’s true. But the raiding gives us more attention.
I may be quixotic in some regards and Pollyannaish in another, but the raid drew attention to the fact that we’re actually trying to do good journalism. So there’s a positive outcome to the raid.