[Kapura]

This is really, really upsetting to be happening in my country. I know it is a very big country, and Kansas isn't exactly proximate, but we are either a country that protects the press, or we are a country where the press protects those who have power. If this is allowed to pass without the people ordering the raid fired, I am not optimistic about what the future holds.

[sanderjd]

I would argue that we don't know yet whether the system has worked or failed here. No amount of high idealism written on parchment paper can keep small people given power from using it corruptly. What matters is what happens then. If everyone were to shrug this off and say "well of course, that's just the way things go in America", then yep, I'm totally with you that this is really upsetting.

But I don't think that's what's happening here at all. I have seen this story all over the place in national news. And what I think is that the mere fact that any of us living nowhere near this little town are aware this happened means that the people responsible for it are in deep sh*t. I think they'll be made an example of. I think the state and federal justice systems will be racing each other to make an example of them.

And if I'm right about that, it's not an upsetting indictment of the system, it's an affirmation of its success.

[the_optimist]

Our press doesn’t even protect the press at this point. We have all seen the tables pairing heads of each major news outlets with their respective political spouses, siblings, or parents. Gellhorn prize winner Julian Assange has been persecuted by the US intel complex for well over a decade.

The choice is in your hands to continue to attribute credibility to institutions that may no longer merit it.

[xadhominemx]

The fact that a raid on a tiny kanas newspaper is a major national story is a sign that the press is pretty interested in protecting the press.

[dotnet00]

I disagree. All it shows is that national media outlets don't see the tiny newspaper as a threat.

They consider independent reporting (eg YouTubers) to be the main threat, thus why we don't really see them making national headlines out of their suppression and why they even go out of their way to exclude them from their definition of press.

[xadhominemx]

Social media algorithmic recommendation engines has also been a major story. Or are you talking about a US law enforcement raid on some YouTuber that was successfully covered up by Google?

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> some YouTuber

They're saying that a YouTuber is most often not seen as a valid journalist in the eyes of the government despite Freedom of The Press being a supposed "unalienable right". Once they've been disclaimed as a journalist ("go out of their way to exclude them from their definition of press"), suddenly they're performing espionage if they report information that someone in the government didn't want to be revealed.

[xadhominemx]

Who fits this description?

[gotoeleven]

They are very interested in stories like this because this gives them the chance to work themselves into high dudgeon about a shitty little paper no one cares about. This way they have something to point to when they pull their "50 intelligence officials said this is russian disinfo" bullshit. "We're not unprincipled, self-serving, corrupt morons look how huffy we got about this tiny paper in kansas!"

[BenjiWiebe]

Hey, Marion county resident checking in. I care about that paper. It's interesting.

[xadhominemx]

So it seems you agree with me that the press is in fact inclined to protect the press?

[the_optimist]

This is a motte-and-bailey. The initial response has answered directly already.

[Melting_Harps]

> They are very interested in stories like this because this gives them the chance to work themselves into high dudgeon about a shitty little paper no one cares about. This way they have something to point to when they pull their "50 intelligence officials said this is russian disinfo" bullshit. "We're not unprincipled, self-serving, corrupt morons look how huffy we got about this tiny paper in kansas!"

Furthermore, the stifling of not just Assange or Snowden no withstanding, there has also been direct vilification of people who stand up for the first Amendment; people seem to have glossed over that James Larkin (of Backpage infamy) who commited suicide while under extreme duress for his trail is actually a newpaper owner.

He had been committed to standing up to power in a litany of documented stories, and even got settlements from them to keep operations going, it's sad, but I don't think the US mainstream news is worth anything but a coaxed form of derision, fear and a perverse 'infotainment.'

Being from SoCal in the 90s I saw how the paprazzi made everything about celebrity a cult-like mania, and car chases, I still remember the OJ case being played where cartoons once stood; in the 2000s I saw it go to chasing on reality TV and socialites and just tuned out. It's also why I saw social media for what it was: it was a eye-ball grabbing solution to fill the vacumm in order to cash in on people's need to doomscrool and engage in pointless online fighting--most of us who grew up on the internet at the time had been in enough flamewars to know what this was.

Honestly, I wish I could say I was entirely immune to it by only following a few sources and journalists, but I did follow the riots during COVID and saw the Blueleaks thing unfold and saw this captures people's attention.

Elon destroying what little credibility he has since taking over Twitter/X and desperately holding on to his cult of personality the Market may have bestowed him by taking credit for his worker's efforts with reality TV like antics (celebrity fighting?) has been amusing but his comeupance raises a valid point: there is no trusted news source since its been so monetized.

I feel that because British disinformation and Soviet/Russian propaganda tactics have been so pervasive and effective with these mediums that no one really knows what is going on at all. And that may be intended.

I'm reminded about this clip from Newswipe of Bitter Lake [0] at least every 6 months, and seeing how more relevant it becomes with every passing year.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOY4Ka-GBus

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

These days it is touted as 'public-private partnership' and it extends far beyond press.

[sitkack]

Fired isn't enough. Poor people go to jail. The powerful move on to the next job where willingness to participate in corruption is a merit badge itself.

[hanniabu]

It's a bit naive to think there's freedom of press in this country (freedom to publish without retribution)

[empath-nirvana]

Freedom of the press is not freedom to publish "without retribution", and never has been. It is freedom to publish without _government_ retribution.

If you publish some awful stuff, other people are allowed to point out that you said awful stuff and there are consequences for that, and that's how it's supposed to work.

[mcpackieh]

> Freedom of the press is not freedom to publish "without retribution", and never has been. It is freedom to publish without _government_ retribution.

You're talking about the American First Amendment specifically, not freedom of the press generally. The World Press Freedom Index includes sociocultural context and safety; if journalists are being attacked by mobs of angry citizens that is obviously a problem for the freedom of the press. To assert otherwise is ludicrous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

[mrguyorama]

ANY "freedom of speech" that curtails the speech of people responding, using their own free speech, to someone saying something, is not freedom of speech, but rather an attempt to silence critics.

If you believe in "Freedom to publish without retribution", you believe in "might makes right".

[mcpackieh]

> curtails the speech of people responding

What are you on about? Honestly. Violence and violent intimidation are not free speech, if violence against journalists is coming from any party other than the government, how is that not a threat to free speech simply by virtue of it coming from parties other than the government? Can you answer that without going off on wild tangents?

Reminder that I responded to a claim that only governments can threaten the freedom of the press. Do I need to explain to that non-governments are capable of murder, or do you understand at least this much?

[jjk166]

Well we already have laws against mobs violently attacking people. Freedom of the press means you suffer no legal consequences from publishing, which would include refusal of the government to enforce its laws to protect people from violence because of what they had published. But if people don't like what you're publishing, they must be free for exactly the same reason to express their opinions and act as they see fit within the normal limits of the law.

[mcpackieh]

> Well we already have laws against mobs violently attacking people.

And violation of those laws is a threat to the freedom of the press.

Let's consider a hypothetical but plausible example: A billionaire named Elon Bezos is tired of journalists exposing his illegal schemes so he hires the Pinkertons to stalk and harass journalists, dox them and post their personal information on 4chan with claims of those journalists working for the pizzagate illuminati, and threaten their friends and family with life ruination and murder. In this hypothetical everything done is illegal and none of it was done by the government; would you therefore earnestly conclude that none of it constitutes a threat to the freedom of the press? Ludicrous.

You need to stop conflating the First Amendment with freedom of the press. The First Amendment is one law that aims to protect the freedom of the press from one specific kind of threat; threats coming from the government. It does not preclude the existence of other kinds of threats to freedom of the press.

[jjk166]

> In this hypothetical everything done is illegal

That's the important bit. Assuming that use of violence against journalists is illegal and the law is enforced, then that is freedom of the press. Similarly your right to own property is protected even if there are burglars out there.

[mrguyorama]

That is a crime of harrassment and other "You're being an ass to someone" crimes. A private person cannot violate the freedom of the press because a private person has almost zero restrictions on their speech. THAT IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH, and any attempt to curtail that response is an attempt to stifle their speech!

[eesmith]

"attacked by mobs of angry citizens" is not the only form of retribution, nor the only negative consequences facing a newspaper.

If, due to publishing an article, everyone decides to stop buying the newspaper or a subscription to the newspaper, and to stop placing ads, then that's a form of retribution/negative consequences.

Freedom of the press does not mean that people must not exercise their right of free association.

[hanniabu]

> It is freedom to publish without _government_ retribution

Which the government would never ruin the facade of freedom so they follow through at unofficial capacities

[pessimizer]

You have no legal basis for saying this, because US freedom of the press rules are about prior restraint, and government retribution isn't prior restraint. You also have no philosophical basis for saying this, because nobody put you in charge of defining what freedom of the press means to everyone else, and you've offered no references to people more respected than yourself on the subject.

But good luck with a definition of freedom of the press that doesn't include when white mobs would break into black newspapers, break the presses, and burn the building down. Does freedom of the press give the government an obligation to prosecute, or nah?

[empath-nirvana]

> Does freedom of the press give the government an obligation to prosecute, or nah?

Yes.

[amalcon]

Unquailfied "freedom to publish without retribution" is obviously impossible. Publishing can be retribution; for an extreme example, see: "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

You can make "freedom to publish without retribution" possible only by qualifying the kind of publishing and/or the kind of retribution.

[adventured]

It is a really big country and there's very little that can stop something like this from happening upfront. A corrupt person is always going to make it some distance before they're stopped, before the corrupt action gets enough sunlight on it. Said corrupt person isn't going to always make it easy to spot/stop, or easy to prosecute.

You have to prosecute and pursue justice after the crime/s, not before. Justice is rarely a fast event. It's identical to someone walking into a convenience store and robbing it. You can't literally stop that from happening, you have to have a justice system that will prosecute crime. There are of course no precogs yet (Minority Report [0]).

What happens next is far more important than that it happened.

> If this is allowed to pass without the people ordering the raid fired, I am not optimistic about what the future holds.

Given the scale of the US, that's overly dramatic for sure. All sorts of bad things - far worse than this - happen on a small level in the US across the states, that have practically no impact on the wider nation.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

[winter_blue]

There is a duty/obligation on the U.S. federal government to protect freedom of the press, especially if the organs of a state government act to violate it.

Given that the KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) was in on it, and given that a Kansas district judge signed a search warrant in the absence of an affidavit (which I'm sure this judge was well-aware was needed, but it seems this judge simply didn't care about the rule of law), one can say that multiple organs of the Kansas state acted in cohort to violate the First Amendment.

OP wrote:

> If this is allowed to pass without the people ordering the raid fired, I am not optimistic about what the future holds

If the state of Kansas doesn't hold the people who did this to account (especially, at the very least by impeaching this judge), we absolutely need the federal government to step in, and hopefully both prosecute & imprison the individuals involved in this egregious rights violation. IANAL, but 18 U.S. Code § 242 "Deprivation of rights under color of law" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242) seems applicable here.

If both Kansas and especially the federal government fail to prosecute the hold the people who ordered this raid into account, I'm not particularly optimistic about the future of the U.S. either.

[sanderjd]

> There is a duty/obligation on the U.S. federal government to protect freedom of the press, especially if the organs of a state government act to violate it.

But you seem to be commenting as if the U.S. federal government has already failed to uphold this duty. But that makes no sense because this just happened. Now that this is widespread national news, there is very little chance that these criminals get to walk away from this. These people are all going down, whether on state or federal charges (or both). But it will take months or years, because that's how long it takes.

There is almost certainly a story here about how it requires widespread news attention to get something like this sorted out, but once there is widespread news attention, the jig is up.

[anigbrowl]

This is all true, but gives the feeling of tiptoeing around an elephant taking up most of the space in a room. Core federal political institutions are in a dire state due to a poisonous combination of rhetoric and corruption. I think the reason that reaction to this particular story in Kansas has been so strong is not because it's precedential by because it's symptomatic and so perfectly epitomizes the increasing disconnect between ideals and outcomes.

[dfxm12]

We can't pretend this is the first time something like this has happened. The problem is we see this abuse of power all the time and no one pays the consequences. The problem is qualified immunity is baked in to our legal system, so it is all too easy for those responsible to evade justice.

[andsoitis]

> we see this abuse of power all the time and no one pays the consequences

Where there is no consequence to the police departments go after the press who are investigating them?

I don’t know that we see that all the time! In fact, that’s why this story is news!

[petsfed]

A quick search revealed at least 10 distinct incidents in the US over the last 4 years (mainly in summer 2020) of reporters identifying themselves as such, and then being attacked by police. I haven't done the work to see how often there were repercussions for those attacks, but I'm willing to be its pretty rare.

[sanderjd]

Your quick search doesn't seem to have revealed something that is the same as the story we're discussing.

Like, I totally agree with you about qualified immunity and law enforcement abuses of power, but come on, you're using this story to make extremely tangential points.

This isn't an example of law enforcement attacks on the press going unpunished. I saw this on the Today show this morning. This is mainstream national news. The criminals who perpetrated this are no longer the beneficiaries of a system that is corruptly stacked in their favor, they are f'd. They will be speaking to the US DoJ, and soon, and the conversation will not go well.

For sure, when abuses of power don't get widespread attention, they can easily go unchecked. And that's bad. But this isn't that.

[petsfed]

Its a reach on my part, granted.

My claim is that there's less distance in the mind of the police between beating up a reporter for taking pictures of the police behaving badly, and raiding a newspaper for investigating reports of the police behaving badly.

[dfxm12]

This isn't an example of law enforcement attacks on the press going unpunished.

OK, I'll bite. What was the punishment?

[mindslight]

> You have to prosecute and pursue justice after the crime/s, not before. Justice is rarely a fast event

While I'm sympathetic to your comment in isolation, do you think there is any chance that after the slow wheels of justice do turn, these violent thugs and their facilitators are actually going to end up in prison for armed assault, robbery, kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, etc? This is the breakdown in the rule of law that people are outraged about, regardless of the somewhat unreasonable desire that justice should happen quicker. If justice were merely slow but still dependable, people wouldn't be nearly as outraged.

Also if there were a consistent pattern of rogue law enforcement employees getting designated as having acted outside of their state-granted authority, prosecuted as regular criminals, and going to prison, this particular incident would have been less likely to happen in the first place. So given the larger context it's a bit specious to say we just need to give the situation time, when time mostly serves to make the widespread attention fade.

[sanderjd]

They are going to end up in prison for different crimes than those ones. (Although "criminal conspiracy" will show up in there somewhere, probably.) I don't think the specific crimes are really the point here...

This is not a demonstration of the breakdown of the rule of law, until the law actually fails to act on it. And I think that's incredibly unlikely at this point. But maybe the justice system will indeed fail to act on this, and then we should have this conversation and you'll probably find I agree with you.

But it's impossible for the justice system to have acted on this yet.

It's good to be outraged; our outrage is why this will be acted upon, so we must maintain that. But it's, frankly, dumb, to jump to this "the entire system is broken because these people are still walking free after a non-zero number of days!". That's just not how it works!

[mindslight]

Sure, in this specific case nothing has happened yet that implies the rule of law has entirely broken down. The real problem driving the national outrage is the long pattern of the justice system not sufficiently binding government employees to the law. If this violent gang was not also employed as police officers, then we'd expect arrests and charges within a week or so. So that's around when we can say that the justice system will start to diverge based on the perps being in a different class.

And actually I'd say this substitution of different crimes is definitely part of the problem. Having a parallel set of laws that apply to government employees is still preserving this notion of a two class justice system where cops are immune from regular laws. If anything, the perps should be charged with both the various color of law framings for the damage to their institutions and for the straightforward crimes of their personal actions outside of their lawful employment duties.

[sanderjd]

Ok but it's ridiculous that most of the comments here are like "this just goes to show that this country is corrupt!" and like, no, it doesn't!

Fine, you want to have a broader discussion, that's your prerogative. But it's just not true that the current facts of this case are evidence for anything going wrong in US society. That doesn't mean nothing is! I'm honestly not interested in having that broader nuanced discussion in this forum. But I am interested in pointing out nonsense when I see it, and using this case in its current state as evidence of any kind of break-down in the rule of law is just that: nonsense.

Edit to engage directly more:

This is not the same as a mob raiding a newspaper, because law enforcement is, for good reason, given the benefit of the doubt. Especially when they actually do involve the courts by getting a warrant. This makes it worse than a mob when they act corruptly, and especially when the courts also acted corruptly. It's worse, but in ways that make it slower to investigate. The criminality of a regular mob is clear, while the criminality of a law enforcement agency with the support of a judge is unclear. Whereas it would not be hasty to arrest all the members of the mob in a couple days, it would be hasty to arrest all the police officers and a judge prior to figuring out the full story, which takes time.

So no, the system has not failed if it takes more than a week to see arrests. It will likely take more like 6 months to a year. And yep, I would absolutely like complex investigations to go way faster, but it's not unusual or evidence of corruption when they take months or years, it's the normal state.

[mindslight]

On reconsideration, I think the facts of this case might actually lead to some prison sentences. Although not nearly as many as there should be - really anyone involved in this including the judge that fabricated paperwork based off dubious details, other law enforcement agencies that blessed it, etc should be charged as part of the criminal conspiracy, which they can then explain away in court, as is routinely done to suspects who aren't government employees.

I think the root of the distrust is there are many other similar cases which seemingly go completely unpunished (eg Afroman). So the details being much worse here is causing proportionally more outrage, when the reality is that those details being more severe means we might actually end up seeing some semblance of justice for at least some of the perps on this one.

[dcow]

Your comment is slightly self-contradictory.

First you say it's really important to prosecute all crime because justice is about the response to crime.

Then you say it's silly to be worried that a bunch of "small crime" (furthermore, there's nothing to indicate in this case that this is a small crime) goes unpunished all the time.

Which one is it? Do we care about crime or don't we? I'd say it's actually the little crimes going unpunished that worry me the most... car theft, shoplifting, etc. These signal to participants that it's okay to behave in a way that is not in line with the stated laws of the land. Building this safe space for petty crime is far more dangerous than having a one-off corrupt asshole who committed a more "serious" crime run free on a legal technicality, because the safe-space normalizes bad behavior and desensitizes society to crime.

[ethbr1]

I understood parent to be making an observation about timescales.

In the short term, there is and will be overreach by law enforcement and prosecution.

In the intermediate/long term, we should recognize these incidents and ensure redress is made and justice is brought.

Which seems a pretty reasonable position:

- People need flexibility to do their jobs

- We should have robust oversight to review actions taken

- We should consider irreversible actions extremely seriously (or prevent them outright)