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Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 5:07 am
Where I last left off in the saga of the raid on a newspaper office an hour south of here, I was waiting to see what information the cops had that could possibly justify such an action.
Well, they don’t. Turns out, based on documents the cops used to persuade a judge to sign a search warrant, that they conducted the raid because they thought a reporter had, to put it bluntly, done her job.
Somebody gave the reporter a document indicating that the owner of a restaurant in Marion had a DUI on her record. If true, that would have jeopardized her liquor license. The reporter used the document to check a state government website to determine if the information was accurate.
That’s the reporter’s job. As it turned out, the restaurant owner did have a previous DUI, but the paper decided not to publish a story. The decision to do so, or not do so, is the job of the editor and publisher of the paper.
The supposed violation of the law that the cops used to support their request for a search warrant was some sort of invasion of privacy; the allegation is that it’s illegal to search the government website using somebody’s driver’s license number, if you’re not in fact that person.
I can understand the need for laws that protect people from identity theft, but there’s a substantial difference between that and checking a driving record to verify information for a news story.
There are a lot of other elements to this story, none of which really change the central point. The most astounding thing to me remains that a judge would sign off on the warrant. Which of course leads to questions about the judge, and it turns out that she had a couple of DUIs herself. Perhaps that explains something that seems so irrational.
The good part of the story is that the prosecutor, upon reflection, rescinded the search warrant and gave the newspaper its seized equipment back, saying essentially that it had all been a mistake. The other good part is that the heavy-handedness of the search has been widely condemned; I’ve heard from many, many of you good folks about this issue.
At a time when local independent professional journalism is under assault, both in its business fundamentals and by political partisans at both extremes, that is very gratifying. There’s wide agreement that, even if you interpret this issue in the worst possible light, the newspaper did nothing even close to illegal. In fact, it was doing exactly what it ought to be doing: Checking facts.
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