File this under “the wheels of justice grind slowly”: The former Kansas police chief who ordered an illegal raid against a newspaper office and two private homes one year ago has been charged with felony obstruction of justice.
According to The Associated Press:
The single charge against former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody alleges that he knowingly or intentionally influenced the witness to withhold information on the day of the raid of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher or sometime within the following six days.
For those of you who have been following this case from the start, the charge pertains to a restaurant owner whose driving records were obtained by the newspaper. The records were obtained legally, and the paper never actually wrote about them, but Cody claimed the paper violated the law because of a statutory quirk. It later turned out that the Record was investigating Cody’s wrongdoing at his previous job — something that was entirely unrelated to the restaurant owner.
Last month, former Record reporter Deb Gruver reached a $235,000 settlement in her federal lawsuit against Cody, whom she accused of grabbing her cellphone and injuring her hand.
Publisher Eric Meyer is suing local officials over the death of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, who was stricken a day after officers entered her home and rifled through her property.
Here are a few other developments on the local news front:
- In New York City, WCBS-AM is ending its 60-year run as an all-news station, a move that The New York Times reports will claim 23 jobs. The station’s owner, Audacy, will continue with an all-news format on WINS-FM. New York is also the home of WNYC-FM, a large public station devoted to news and information.
- Times Media Group, a newspaper chain based in Tempe, Arizona, has gone on a rampage of cuts at four weekly papers and a semi-monthly that it acquired in Southern California recently. Thomas Corrigan, who writes the Inland Empire MediaWatch newsletter, reports that editors at three of the weeklies have been fired and that the new owner has cracked down on freelance expenses as well. Corrigan observes that the papers will “lose years of institutional and community knowledge.”
- Michael Aron, regarded as the dean of New Jersey’s press corps, has died at the age of 78. Aron spent the latter part of his career as a political reporter at NJ Spotlight News, one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I write about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”