Try That in a Small Town
The population of Marion, KS is 1,902. It is the very definition of the small town referred to in Jason Aldean’s hotly contested country song.
Small, rural areas operate by their own rules in part because they’re too tiny for the rest of us to really spend time worrying about them but these small towns are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to how society works.
My folks had a home in Marion for approximately ten years on the shores of a WPA man-made lake so I’m as familiar with it as I am Wichita. One grocery store. A coupla churches. The main drag is populated with a few open buildings and a lot of boarded up ones. Two gas stations on opposite ends of town. A local dump where you had to gather up your trash and take it instead a garbage truck swinging by your house. The people are generally pretty nice although it took my mother several years before she was seen as anything but an outsider. A nice tiny park. Within a thirty-minute drive are four more tiny towns on all sides and an hour’s drive gets you to the only city in range, Wichita.
It’s remote and self-contained.
There is one local paper, the Marion County Record and it prints out 2,000 actual newspapers every Wednesday as it has for decades. In 1998, Eric Meyer, a former reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and a professor at the University of Illinois, bought the newspaper and two others nearby — the Hillsboro Star-Journal and Peabody Gazette-Bulletin — from the previous publisher, the Hoch family, who had owned them for 124 years. Since then Meyer has become a gadfly to the local government.
Alongside articles about a ten-year-old guitarist playing at the area rest home for residents and profiles of Marion residents of note were exposés of the five-person police department, financial malfeasance by the city council members, and the kind of solid journalism that a local paper is mandated to report. Meyer was not a darling in the eyes of the constabulary or the lawmakers of the region. His seven person staff held them accountable as all solid media should.
Joan Meyer, 98, the co-owner with her son, Eric, collapsed on Saturday afternoon and died at her home a day after she tearfully watched officers who showed up at her home with a search warrant take away her computer as well as an internet router. After officers also photographed the bank statements of her son and left her house in mess, Meyer had been unable to eat or sleep, her newspaper said.
Meyer was “in good health for her age”, the weekly newspaper asserted. And the headline of its report on her death said the police’s decision to raid the Marion Record’s offices along with the homes of its reporters and publishers was not only illegal – but had also contributed to bringing on the end of Meyer’s life.
The Marion County Record said in its own published reports that police raided the newspaper’s office on Friday, seizing the newspaper’s computers, phones and file server and the personal cellphones of staff, based on a search warrant. One Record reporter said one of her fingers was injured when Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand, according to the report.
Meyer wrote that he believes the raid was prompted by a story published last week about a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. Newell had police remove Meyer and a newspaper reporter from her restaurant early this month, who were there to cover a public reception for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Republican representing the area. The police chief and other officials also attended and were acknowledged at the reception, and the Marion Police Department highlighted the event on its Facebook page.
The next week at a city council meeting, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of using illegal means to get information on a drunken driving conviction against her. The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it sought to verify through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story on Newell’s DUI, but it did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell confirmed the 2008 DUI conviction herself.
The entire affair is reminiscent of the scene in Roadhouse where the local auto dealer defies the authority of the Big Bad Brad Wesley (Ben Gazarra) and the response is to bulldoze over his establishment including a parking lot full of used cars for sale.
This is the small town stand-in that fans of Aldean’s song fetishize. Places all over America where the people who have gained power hold onto it with a grubby rage ready to pounce on anyone so bold as to challenge their authority. Places filled with people terrified of forces outside their control trying to tell them how to run their towns, how to teach their children about race and immigration, who would much rather the movie theater an hour away show Sound of Freedom than Barbie. Places with pro-Trump signs still peppered in yards and a homegrown disdain for those who would try to settle down in their areas without being first born there.
The Fourth Estate hasn’t been doing itself any favors lately. As a combatant to the propaganda of FOX, journalism has done away with the concept of objectivity as a goal and doubled down in rhetorical jingoism of ideological stance and the result is both a historic distrust of the media as well as a fueling of the very differences that split societies apart.
“It seems like one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time,” said Sharon Brett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The breadth of the raid and the aggressiveness in which it was carried out seems to be “quite an alarming abuse of authority from the local police department,” Brett said.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that the raid appeared to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, “and basic human decency.”
“This looks like the latest example of American law enforcement officers treating the press in a manner previously associated with authoritarian regimes,” Stern said. “The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs.”
This seems small. An unsanctioned, potentially illegal raid on a local newspaper over the dirty laundry of a restauranteur feels as silly and weird as the Texas cheerleader mom trying to assassinate her daughter’s rival. It seems small but the same playbook is employed by the QAnon crackpots and our former president. What happens in these small towns is bound to travel to the larger towns and infect the country like the sublimal paranoia in a dystopian science fiction story. Why do you think small towns are the settings for so many horror films?
If only Patrick Swayze were still alive.