{"id":14913,"date":"2024-07-09T09:50:47","date_gmt":"2024-07-09T13:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsmediaalliance.org\/?p=14913"},"modified":"2025-02-16T13:14:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T18:14:56","slug":"news-take-free-press-focus-how-to-ensure-protections-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsmediaalliance.org\/news-take-free-press-focus-how-to-ensure-protections-press\/","title":{"rendered":"News Take: Free Press Focus: How Do We Ensure Protections for the Press After Shocking Police Raid?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guests: Eric Meyer, Publisher, Marion County Record and Gabe Rottman, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP)<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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“The legal protections that were there should have been adequate to prevent this. This is a case of government overreach. And in some cases, as much as I would like to say this is a First Amendment issue, it’s a Fourth Amendment issue. There really wasn’t a point to any of these searches.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

–\u00a0 Eric Meyer, <\/em>Marion County Record<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s really important that Congress finally step into that breach and pass a federal law that provides certainty across the country at a federal level on the scope of a reporter’s privilege and how it works.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

–\u00a0 Gabe Rottman, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In August 2023, the Marion County Record<\/em>, a small local newspaper in Marion, Kansas, drew national headlines when it was the target of a police raid that has been harshly criticized as an attack on the free press. In the raid, Marion County police, without just cause, seized newsroom equipment and documents from the newspaper’s office and the homes of Publisher Eric Meyer and his mother, Co-Owner Joan Meyer. In this episode of News Take: Free Press Focus, a subseries of the News Take podcast, Eric Meyer shares the story of that fateful day and the events leading up to it and why it was preventable, and Gabe Rottman, a senior attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), talks to us about the dire implications for a free press when journalists’ rights are violated and the importance of a federal shield law, such as the PRESS Act, that would protect journalists’ confidential sources.<\/p>\n

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Listen or download the audio file to listen offline:<\/h4>\n

Don\u2019t forget to subscribe<\/span> to the News Take podcast<\/strong> by clicking \u201cFollow\u201d and selecting your preferred podcasting platform, or\u00a0click on your preferred platform: Spotify<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, Apple<\/a><\/span>, and\u00a0YouTube Music<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n