‘Could that happen to us?’: Study details Kansas journalists’ reactions to 2023 newspaper raid 

Marion County Record publisher Eric Meyer gestures during an Aug. 16, 2023, news conference at the newspaper office. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

More than two years after the police raid on the Marion County Record, Kansans still grapple with what the action means. 

Was it a coordinated attack on free speech that reveals broad American attitudes about journalism and free speech? 

Was it an isolated, reckless act that we should shrug off so that the incident doesn’t intimidate reporters and editors? 

Was it a warning bell that roused Kansas journalists to be more ardent watchdogs for their communities?  

A recent article co-written by a professor at the University of Kansas works to bring new meaning to Aug. 11, 2023, the day that law enforcement executed search warrants that threatened the rural newspaper. One of the answers it provides: The raid caused “shared press distress.”  

Published in Journal of Communications Inquiry, the article “‘Shared Press Distress’ and the Police Raid on a Newspaper” was written by Nick Mathews of the University of Missouri and Stephen Wolgast, my colleague at the University of Kansas. 

Aside from summarizing basic facts of the raid, the article describes how the newspaper was victim to misguided allegations that pointed toward the need for a search warrant. 

“Five days after the raid, the county prosecutor withdrew the search warrants, citing insufficient evidence to link ‘this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized,’” the article says. 

More significantly, Wolgast and Mathews detail how Kansas journalists reacted to the raid, and in doing so, they describe the human levers that operate inside journalists each day as we decide what to cover and how to cover it.

The article also makes clear how complicated the interchange of those levers can be in 2025, especially at rural Kansas outlets where journalists work in a climate of newspaper closures, declining revenue, staff cuts and political animosity. 

The word “trauma” — or a form of it — appears dozens of times, even more frequently than the paper’s references to “shared press distress.” To a significant degree, trauma unifies the article. 

 “While not as extreme, the police raid on the Kansas newspaper — and the death of its elderly co-owner the following day — serves as yet another reminder that trauma and journalism are often intertwined and highlights how traumatic experiences of one journalist can reverberate throughout the entire journalistic community,” Wolgast and Mathews write.

However, the article doesn’t quote journalists using the word “trauma” to describe their experiences. Instead, it divides the reactions of the 19 journalists from 16 new organizations into two broad categories: emotional and practical reactions. 

Kansas journalists said they felt shock, fear, defiance, unity and discomfort following the raid. 

One told the researchers, “I would say that we’re all a little more cognizant now of the reality that police actually could walk in the door and (seize) all of our stuff.”

Another said, “And you know what’s kind of chilling? It kind (of) made me sit back and think to myself, could that happen to us?”

The article also describes how the journalists acted during the months that followed the raid.  

“In the wake of the raid, the Kansas journalists balanced their raw emotions with realworld, practical concerns — revisiting their own reporting, reckoning with the financial strain of legal defense, and reevaluating their relationships with local law enforcement,” the article says.

Journalists admitted to the chilling nature of the raid, which caused them to feel more hesitant. 

The friction between the local law enforcement at the Marion County Record staff prompted Kansas journalists to reflect on their relationships with local officials and law enforcement, the study says. 

“You hate to say you’re going to temper your coverage, but maybe not put it all out there, kind of like we used to,” one journalist said. 

The raid in central Kansas also reminded journalists that they can’t do the reporting they need to do.  

“We don’t have the staff to do what we did before,” a journalist told the researchers. “We just don’t. And (the investigative reporting) is really kind of a dulled down version of what we used to have.” 

This change in journalistic priorities troubles Wolgast, as he told me in an interview this week. Oversight of government officials — particularly their power to spend public funds — remains a key function of a free press, Wolgast said. 

“We’re essentially their managers,” Wolgast said. “They work for us, so they should respond to us. Journalism is there because you and I can’t go to every school board meeting and Library Commission meeting and city council meeting and county commission meetings, all the committee meetings in the Legislature.”

“So we need journalism to cover these government bodies,” he continued. “And if the government bodies are going to choose to retaliate in some way, then it’s a threat to oversight, because who else oversees the government?”

Wolgast explained that “shared press distress” needn’t be traumatic.

“Perhaps it can just be distressing to see what happens to another professional. It’s just a concern,” Wolgast said. “Not only that, if it’s happened to him, then it could have happened to me too.”

Giving a name like shared press distress to a familiar feeling will likely seem overly dramatic to many Americans: journalists seeking more of the spotlight, and this time for their suffering. A public already skeptical of journalists might see this new phrase and any journalism scholarship as self-consumed navel gazing. 

This all leads me to ask myself: Do I have this same distress, as a member of the press?

Do I suffer when international journalists mourn fellow reporters who were killed in retribution for their reporting in other countries? Or when national political reporters face heckling and veiled presidential threats at campaign rallies? 

Or when I read of another local Kansas newspaper shedding staff or closing completely?

Before this week, I don’t know if I would have called it shared press distress — but perhaps the phrase will flourish during this challenging era for journalists. 

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.