When a raid on a newspaper in a small town in Kansas, with a population of under 2,000 people, makes international news then there must be something at stake worth paying attention to and addressing.
What appears to be a local police response to the newspaper covering a local political story has been picked up by national press across the US and by most UK papers and perhaps beyond.
The story raises alarm bells and calls into question press freedom in the US, which has historically prided itself on ensuring the protection of free speech (which has been in recent years a particularly heated topic around the limits of social media). Now the question is how will this local issues will be determined by a trial or of whether some other intervention will be taken, and while this is a small town, a lot of people and particularly the press will be interested in the outcome
Whatever the result, it reminds us all to be cautious about the threats to free speech and the importance of ensuring press freedom and independence.
"I want to make sure that this gets enough publicity that people won't try to do it anywhere else," Meyer told The Wall Street Journal. "But I regret the fact that that publicity has to make it look like this town that I'm trying to help is a corrupt cesspool."
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