Editors at The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, had many problematic encounters in the tumultuous spring of 1971. Angry demonstrators hoping to control what was published. Worried administrators concerned about what was published. What wasn’t familiar was finding police at the door one April afternoon, search warrant in hand.
The Palo Alto officers started picking through the desks, file drawers and darkroom. What they sought — in vain — were photographs of a recent, violent clash between Palo Alto police officers and student demonstrators. The demonstrators, wielding nail-studded chair legs, had seriously injured some officers breaking up their sit-in.
The shock of the search was palpable. Then came the hard work and long years of challenging the raid all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and, after losing, persuading Congress to pass a 1980 law to end police intrusions into newsrooms and press freedom.
The half-century-old memories of the Daily police raid and the legal fight came tumbling back in 2023, when the Police Chief in the small Kansas town of Marion led an even more intrusive search to the newspaper office and the homes of the editor and reporters.
Officers in the small town of Marion raided the news offices of the Marion Record and the home of its editor and co-owner, Eric Meyer. They seized computers and other electronic equipment, including reporters’ cell phones; one officer jerked a cell phone out of a reporter’s hand. The editor’s mother, Joan, died the day after the raid.
Why do police searches of newsrooms matter? Police searches undermine the foundation of a robust free press — the trust between journalists and confidential sources, whose identities may be revealed when law enforcement searches or seizes unpublished material. This is the case even when law enforcement eventually returns seized equipment and records to the reporters, as the Marion County attorney instructed the local police force to do.
As Senator Edward Kennedy said at a 1980 Judiciary Committee hearing, “By exposing the work product of reporters to the roving eye of any policeman who has obtained a search warrant… it threatens to dry up the confidential sources of information which form the backbone of investigative journalism.”
The situation facing Eric Meyer and the Marion Record hit close to home for me. I served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily. In 1971, with the support of my colleagues, I spearheaded the move to file a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court and led to passage of the Privacy Protection Act.
The Stanford Daily’s lawsuit against the Palo Alto police department and its chief, James Zurcher, became the template on which the modern legal framework covering newspaper searches is based. The Daily’s claim that the search violated its First and Fourth Amendment rights was upheld at two levels of the federal judiciary, but in 1978 the Supreme Court overturned these rulings.
In the wake of that decision, Congress passed the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which explicitly recognized the critical role that the press plays in holding the powerful — from a local police chief to a legislator to a president — publicly accountable. To fulfill this role, the media must be able to guarantee confidentiality to sources who can provide crucial information, and who have a lot to lose if their role becomes known.
The federal law’s rule of thumb: government actors, including the Marion Police Department, must use a subpoena before obtaining a search warrant when seeking information from a media organization. A subpoena instead of a search warrant may not sound like much of a difference, but it prevents police arriving unannounced and forcing their way into newsrooms to rummage through photos, outtakes, video, audio and notes.
The intent underlying the law’s subpoena-first rule: it affords journalists the chance to go to court and fight the government’s request for their unpublished work and documents. Often, the news organization and the law enforcement officials can work things out in the time between the subpoena and the court hearing.
The subpoena requirement also helps avoid two catastrophic consequences. The first is the irreversible chilling effect that arises in the aftermath of a newsroom search and undermines the public’s right to know. Aware of the possibility of an unlawful search, prospective confidential sources inclined to share newsworthy information may hesitate to trust a promise of confidentiality.
The second consequence: searchers gain access to materials that have nothing to do with what they claim to seek. Once law enforcement officials seize a journalist’s computers, notes, cell phone, correspondence, or audio and video recordings, they can find out about anything that reporters are working on.
Marion’s police chief, Gideon Cody, searched the paper just as its journalists were looking into tips about the circumstances of his recent departure from the Kansas City police department, according to Eric Meyer. The tipsters’ identities were in one of the computers police seized. Cody had left a six-figure job as a captain with the Kansas City Police Department in Missouri to take a $60,000 year job as sheriff in Marion. He was under investigation for sexist remarks before leaving Kansas City and, as the Kansas City Star reported, had been told he would be demoted to sergeant before he left for the Marion job.
The accusation that prompted the search in Marion was unrelated to this Kansas City inquiry. The accusation came after the drunk-driving record of a local restaurant owner was leaked to The Record, which confirmed the document’s accuracy but published nothing about it. Instead, Meyer alerted the police about the information; he said he feared that his newspaper was being set up by its source.
But the search warrant cited the accusation of the restaurant owner, Kari Newell, that the newspaper used her personal information to search public records and confirm the conviction — a laughable charge, since the reporters are free to search public records on their own. As Bernie Rhodes, the paper’s lawyer, wrote in a letter to the police chief, Newell’s information “was examined by newspaper staff on a website maintained by the Kansas Department of Revenue.”
Because of the warrant’s spurious claim of illegal acts by the journalists — identity theft and illegal use of a computer — police contend their actions were allowed under the Privacy Protection Act’s exception that allow searches if the paper or its employees are suspected of crimes.
As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press explained in a letter to Chief Cody, this exception does not apply if journalists merely receive, possess, or withhold information from law enforcement, even if it was unlawfully obtained. That newsgathering practice is protected under the First Amendment.
If unsupported claims of lawbreaking by journalists allow law enforcement to bypass the federal subpoena requirements, the wall that Congress built in 1980 to assure journalists confidentiality crumbles away. As Rhodes, the paper’s lawyer, wrote to Cody, “your personal decision to treat the local newspaper as a drug cartel or a street gang offends the constitutional protections the founding fathers gave a free press.”
There are other legal mechanisms to deter press searches by local police forces and federal agents alike. The Kansas media shield law, which covers the Marion County Record, forbids any government entity from forcing a journalist to disclose unpublished information or reveal a source’s identity, unless the information the journalist possesses is of a “compelling interest,” relevant to the legal proceeding at issue, and is inaccessible through other means. Rhodes informed the police chief that this law requires a court hearing before law enforcement can review seized information.
New federal regulations announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland prohibit Justice Department officials from searching, seizing, or issuing subpoenas for the unpublished work product of journalists, with very limited exceptions. These regulations show a serious regard for the wall between the government’s investigatory powers and press independence, even in the context of high-stakes national security reporting.
The Marion County case, troubling as it is, is not unique. Despite efforts to deter these unlawful raids, the Stanford Daily case was a harbinger of future efforts to kneecap journalistic autonomy. Since 2014, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has logged 120 incidents where police searched or seized a journalist’s equipment; 16 were formal searches with warrants.
It is no surprise that many of the reporters targeted were independent journalists or worked for small, local outlets. These are the people who hold local officials accountable when no one else will, despite insufficient pay, limited resources, and the often-unfulfilled promise of public records laws. They are also less likely to have a direct line to an in-house attorney or the resources to hire a law firm.
Some officials who target journalists have paid a price. Bryan Carmody, the California journalist whose home and office were raided by local and federal officials in 2019, after he obtained a confidential document related to the death of a public defender, obtained a six-figure settlement from the City of San Francisco. In 2012, the Oakland-based photojournalist David Morse settled for $162,500 with the University of California after campus police in Berkeley arrested him and seized his unpublished photographs.
Marion County has returned the unlawfully seized materials to the Record and paid hefty fines to the paper and its staff.
Last month Marion County agreed to pay $1.2 million to Eric Meyer, editor of the Record, and the estate of his mother, Joan, a former editor and associate publisher of the paper who died a day after the raid on her home. The county agreed to pay $300,000 to the company that publishes the paper. An additional $650,000 will be paid to Ruth Herbel, the city’s former vice mayor, and her husband, whose home was raided, and $900,000 will be divided among two reporters and another member of the staff.
The county also apologized. It said: “The Sheriff’s Office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion Police Department’s search warrants on their homes and the Marion County Record. This likely would not have happened if established law had been reviewed and applied prior to the execution of the warrants.”
However welcome these outcomes were, they failed to restore the veil of privacy that should shield reporter-source communication.
Sheriff Cody, who lost his job in the aftermath of the raid, faces a criminal charge for interference with a judicial proceeding — “inducing a witness to withhold or delay information in a felony case” — for encouraging the deletion of text messages sent to a witness who knew of the chief’s plans for the action. A jury trial is set to begin Feb. 2, 2026.
The determination to protect the press from searches spurred the Stanford Daily suit 54 years ago. It cannot waver now. Monetary damages and the return of the journalists’ materials are not enough. We need to stop media searches from happening in the first place. As Montana Sen. Max Baucus said during a 1980 hearing on the Privacy Protection Act, “The freedom of the press and individual privacy are fundamental to our democratic system.” In Marion County, that promise of individual privacy disintegrated the moment that police officers entered the Record’s offices.
Felicity Barringer is a former the New York Times correspondent and a writer in residence at Stanford University.
