The Freedom of US Journalism is Under Attack

Matt Bernardini on the alarming decline in the freedom of the US press

“SEIZED but not silenced” - Marion County Record publisher Eric Meyer holds a copy of the newspaper in front of a memorial for his mother and co-owner Joan Meyer, 98, who died the day after police raided the home she shared with her son. Photo: Zuma Press/Alamy Stock Photo.

When police raided a small-town US newspaper and took much of its equipment last month, it looked more like a scene out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia rather than the heartland of America. Yet the move represented the culmination of a growing trend in America, where freedom of the press exists in name only, and journalists increasingly find it harder to operate. 

On 11 August, the Marion, Kansas police force raided the offices of the Marion County Record. Without explaining why they were there, they seized every computer and phone in the newspaper’s office. They also went to the home of the paper’s publisher, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, and took equipment from her. Meyer tragically died the next day, which the newspaper blamed on stress from the prior day’s raid.