Sundance film festival: the story of the Marion County Record and the forces that tried to destroy it is expanded for a charming, and concerning, look at freedom of the press
O
n 11 August 2023, police officers executed a search warrant on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned paper in central Kansas. Local law enforcement seized the computers, cell phones and reporting materials from all staff, as well as from the homes of one city council member and paper co-owner Eric Meyer, without incident – though they met the impassioned resistance of Meyer’s 98-year-old mother Joan, the paper’s other co-owner, who threw her walker to the ground and declared the raid “Nazi stuff”.
“This is illegal,” Eric Meyers warns the officers, as seen in a new documentary on the episode. “You’re going to be on national news tonight.”
He was not wrong. Though the raid could seem small potatoes, Marion being a rural town of around 1,900 about 60 miles north of Wichita, it soon became international news – a symbol of press freedom under attack in a country whose president routinely declares media to be “the enemy of the people”. In national press, the story was quick, troubling and tragic, especially after it was revealed that Joan, “stressed beyond her limits” by the raid, died of a heart attack the next day. In Marion, however, the story was, as small town things tend to go, much more complex, idiosyncratic and gossipy, personal histories and resentments refracted under the spotlight.
