When Local Government Bullies the Press – The Atlantic

Until a few months ago, the tiny town of Atmore, Alabama, was perhaps best known for the glitzy casino-and-hotel complex on its northern border and its proximity to the prison where the state carries out executions. Then Stephen Billy decided to pick a fight with the hometown newspaper, the Atmore News. In October, the paper published a story, based on an anonymous leak, revealing that Billy, the county’s district attorney, was conducting a grand-jury investigation into possible financial fraud by the local school system. Shortly thereafter, Billy charged the paper’s publisher, 73-year-old Sherry Digmon, and its only reporter, 69-year-old Don Fletcher, with violating a state secrecy law. Digmon and Fletcher were cuffed by deputies they’d known for years and charged with felonies that could land them in the local prison for up to three years on each count. They maintained they’d merely reported news of importance.

That a district attorney would use his official powers to criminalize an act of journalism, in defiance of both the First Amendment and the public interest, generated a brief ripple of national attention and criticism. (Billy did not respond to requests for comment. In February, he recused himself from the case, citing a conflict, though the prosecution is ongoing.) But the Atmore arrests weren’t all that unusual: Reporters and news organizations in hundreds of communities have faced interference, intimidation, and harassment from local officials in recent years. These episodes have occurred at a time of waning public support for the news media and amid the industry’s ever-deteriorating financial condition. In other words, officials may be emboldened to bully the press because they believe they can get away with it.

A few months before the Atmore arrests, for example, a similar scenario unfolded in Marion, Kansas (population: 1,922). Earlier that week, the Marion County Record had revealed that a local restaurant owner who was seeking a liquor license had a series of disqualifying violations on her record, including a DUI. The business owner accused the Record of breaching a confidential state database. (The paper denied doing so.) The otherwise mundane dispute exploded into a national story because of what followed: The town’s entire five-member police force swept into the Record’s newsroom, collecting computers, cellphones, and files as evidence. A second group of officers descended on the home of the publisher, Eric Meyer, where Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan, put up a spirited defense in a confrontation caught on video. Less than a day later, she died, apparently of natural causes. The Record blamed her death on the “stress” of the police raid.

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Small weekly papers like those in Atmore and Marion are among the most economically marginal entities in the media. This makes them easy prey for opportunistic or aggressive elected officials. Although most publications are unlikely to face a police raid or arrests anytime soon, they are likely to go out of business: Nearly a third of America’s newspapers have folded in the past 20 years, and most of these have been weekly papers in small communities, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Consider the plight of the McCurtain Gazette, a family-owned newspaper in rural Oklahoma. The paper reported in March that county commissioners had made a series of racist remarks during a meeting and had even discussed hiring a hit man to murder Gazette reporters who’d been digging into alleged misconduct—comments captured by a reporter who left a voice-activated recorder on his seat after leaving the meeting. Instead of investigating the commissioners, however, the local sheriff’s office launched an investigation of the Gazette, accusing the paper of altering the recording and violating a state privacy law.

The Atmore, Marion, and McCurtain episodes are sensational data points in a larger, darker, and more varied picture. A database maintained by the nonprofit Press Freedom Foundation documents roughly 1,000 incidents involving alleged official interference with the U.S. news media since 2017, including arrests of journalists, denial of access to official meetings and proceedings, and equipment searches and seizures. (Another 867 or so incidents involved alleged criminal assaults on reporters by members of the public.) Many of these occurred in small towns, and thus out of the national spotlight. Early last year, for example, Evan Lambert, a reporter for the NewsNation cable network, was thrown to the ground by authorities in East Palestine, Ohio, who forcibly removed him from a press conference about the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals.

The alarming rate of official actions against the news media can’t be divorced from the hostile climate that surrounds reporting these days. Donald Trump has infamously referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; his acolytes have gone even further, such as when Marjorie Taylor Greene called for journalists to be “held accountable—even jailed—for what they did to Trump and our great country.” Tech titans are also publicly hostile to the press; Elon Musk attacks the media while arguing that people should use his platform to do unpaid citizen journalism. Rhetoric like that isn’t likely to inspire a great deal of respect for the Fourth Estate. “Local authorities seem to have gotten the message that they can get away with this,” Trevor Timm, the Press Freedom Foundation’s executive director, told me.

The most alarming growth area for official interference with the press is so-called prior restraint—that is, court orders prohibiting the publication of information. The Supreme Court has consistently held that such orders are the kind of censorship that the First Amendment most clearly prohibits. And yet, 11 prior-restraint orders were issued in 2023, the most since researchers began counting in 2017. Among the targets was Fletcher, the Atmore News reporter, whose bail terms require him not to break any more stories about the grand-jury investigation that landed him in hot water.

Some news-media advocates, such as Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, have urged reporters to openly defy prior-restraint rulings, deeming them blatantly unconstitutional. These rulings do tend to be struck down by higher courts or later withdrawn. But that can be a Pyrrhic victory. Fighting the order can be costly and involve weeks or months of delay. By the time the legal battles are over, the value of whatever news had been suppressed may have declined to zero. An investigative report about, say, an official’s misconduct in office would be pointless if a court kept the information from voters until after an election.

The public’s general antipathy toward the press is spelled out in Gallup’s annual survey of trust in the news media. The percentage of people expressing trust in news reporting last year fell to the lowest level since Gallup began asking the question in 1972. Self-described Republicans traditionally have had the highest mistrust of the press, but that sentiment has lately been increasing among Democrats and independents too.

Although profitable outfits such as The New York Times can afford to mount a defense against government overreach, the typical independent or small-town publication doesn’t have pockets deep enough for a prolonged legal battle. “Many news organizations that formerly would have fought governmental attempts to withhold records, close meetings, or otherwise hinder the press in their newsgathering simply no longer commit resources to doing so,” Jane Kirtley, a media and law professor at the University of Minnesota, told me.

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The true cost of media intimidation is measured not in punishments handed out, but in stories never pursued. The media’s delicate financial picture acts as a hidden hand on editorial decisions, limiting what news organizations are willing to take on. “Smaller newsrooms or citizen journalists that are so afraid of the risk of a criminal prosecution, an aggressive search, or a lawsuit, regardless of how realistic of a threat those are, may alter what they’d be reporting on otherwise,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told me.

The silver lining is that, so far, justice tends to prevail, though it can take a long time and cost a lot. The district attorney who approved and oversaw the confiscation of the Marion County Record’s computers and other property wound up returning the material after a public outcry. The police chief who led the raids was suspended and eventually resigned. In McCurtain County, media attention surrounding the Gazette prompted Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt to call on four officials to resign. Two did so. Evan Lambert filed a civil-rights lawsuit for unlawful arrest in East Palestine; last month, he obtained a $112,000 settlement.

In Atmore, Sherry Digmon and Don Fletcher are still awaiting their fate. As of this writing, more than four months after their arrests, no trial date has been set. Their attorneys, citing the First Amendment and case law upholding the right to publish legally obtained information, have asked a judge to dismiss the charges against them. If they prevail, it would be a validation of the constitutional right to a free press—a right that protects all Americans, not just journalists. But they still might think twice about exercising it.