A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the Marion County Record.Raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists. At the Record, a family-owned paper with a circulation of about 4,000, the police seized computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. They also searched the home of the publication’s owner and semiretired editor as well as the home of a city councilwoman.The searches, conducted on Friday, appeared to be linked to an investigation into how a document containing information about a local restaurateur found its way to the local newspaper — and whether the re …
