Anyone with an interest in newspapers — or the U.S. Constitution — has had at least one eye glued to what’s been happening at the Marion County Record in Marion, Kan.

This family-owned, small weekly newspaper about an hour north of my birthplace of Wichita, Kan., has been the center of a First Amendment storm created by small-town politics and legal over-reaching.

How the story developed is a fairly common occurrence in the news industry. A local restaurant owner asked reporters to leave a meeting with a U.S. Representative behind hosted at her business, which the newspaper covered.

After that, a source sent the paper information concerning the legal history of the restaurant owner. The paper bowed out of reporting this information, having no interest in being embroiled in an ongoing divorce dispute. However, they did pass the information along to authorities.

Under the pretense the Record received the information illegally, on Aug. 11, local police and sheriff’s deputies raided the newspaper office and the home of its 98-year-old co-owner. They seized all the equipment Record employees needed to put a paper out, using “Gestapo tactics” according to Co-Owner Eric Meyer, son of Joan Meyer, 98, with whom he lived.

The description of the raid is fair as they come. It was unprecedented in America, more typical of nations in the middle east or Asia, where freedom of the press is hardly a guarantee.

And, the consequences were deadly. The Meyer family, who has more than 70 years invested into the Record, lost its matron.

“Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home… Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home,” the paper reported.

Ultimately, all the newspaper’s seized material — computers, cell phones, server, etc. — were returned in time for it to print the following week.

Since then, the paper has received incredible support from the news industry worldwide, and it still needs it.

Just this week it reported one seized item was not returned to them, a flash drive containing data protected by the Constitution, as well as federal and state law. The hits keep coming.

Although I don’t know him personally, Eric Meyer and I are members of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. Joan Meyer’s husband, Bill, won the organization’s top award in 2002 for excellence in journalism.

Our papers are strikingly similar. The Record was established in 1869, two years prior to the Democrat, and it has been family-owned by only two families for all but the first 5 years of its history.

Its office is across from the county courthouse, its circulation is similar to ours and the population of Marion is about 2,000 people.

Though I see so much of ourselves in them, I cannot imagine what it would be like to walk in their shoes.

Newspapers, and news media in general, have suffered in recent years for simply doing their jobs. I spoke in this column recently about gatekeeping and selecting which stories are fit for print and which are not. The Record, it seems, was punished for making the appropriate editorial decision with information provided to them.

Even when performing their duties with the utmost integrity, they are the victim of a raid that should have never happened and lost a family member that should be alive.

For a while there a few years ago, there were a handful of people who jokingly called me “fake news” when I’d show up to events. As a professional journalist who prides myself on being factual and reporting with transparency and integrity, I could not be more insulted. I, however, doubt I would have showed it, instead playing along and doing my job as I knew best.

As the Fourth Estate, news media is tasked with a burden of responsibility to report stories fairly and accurately. Anything less is a dereliction of duty and damaging not only to the media reporting poorly, but every other media who readers may equate to it.

Reporting fairly and accurately inherently does not favor everyone. Bad things happen, whether intentioned or not, and freely reporting to understand and learn from those situations is vital to a Democratic Republic.

Because of that responsibility, we wish to be held to a high standard of quality, integrity, honesty and transparency. If those characteristics are absent, we’ve failed you.

We stand with the Marion County Record and journalists across the world doing their jobs — whether free press is protected or not.

Kyle Troutman has served as the editor of the Cassville Democrat since 2014 and became Publisher in 2023. He was named William E. James/Missouri Outstanding Young Journalist for daily newspapers in 2017, and he won a Golden Dozen Award from ISWINE in 2022. He may be reached at 417-847-2610 or ktroutman@cassville-