Free Press and Democratic Government with Eric Meyer | Constitution Day Live 2024

0:00 After the ratification of our Constitution, our nation was very quick to add ten amendments and the very first one of those, at least as we have them listed, now, deals with the freedom of the press, how we manage information, the exchange of ideas, and our society. Those words have been important throughout our nation’s history. They don’t execute themselves. They don’t just magically mean that everything is going to go okay. And I’m joined today by someone who has paid a certain price personally and demonstrated some real courage in assertion of that First Amendment right with his local newspaper, the Marion County Record. Eric Meyer is the publisher of that paper, and it’s my pleasure to interview him today. Eric, welcome and thank you for taking the time to speak to our audience.

0:48 Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. Journalism seems to have been a lifelong passion for you. How did that start? Oh geez. I’ve been a news nerd as long as I’ve been alive. Really? but I didn’t decide. I really wanted to go into it until my senior year in college, when I actually saw what it did while I was editor of my student newspaper. But I’m a third generation journalist. My grandmother was one of the first to sort of escape the pink collared ghetto at, daily newspapers and was out of the women’s section and covering real news. And I used to go and visit her in the newsroom of the Wichita Eagle before I knew how to read and write. But I saw all these people down there grabbing these pieces of paper and these big fat pencils and scrawling stuff on the paper, and then going over and putting it into a pneumatic tube and sending it off to the composing room.

1:36 So I went one day while I was visiting her, and she was busy writing her story. I went through a wastebasket and found a bunch of old copy and marked it all up, even though I couldn’t read and send it up to the composing room, and eventually the composing room, Foreman comes down and says, what are we supposed to do with this stuff? But that that’s that was the start of things. Even as a little kid, one of my favorite toys was I had a block of wood that I’d stapled a piece of string around and a long string on the bottom was my lavalier microphone. And as a kid growing up in Kansas, one of the things you did all summer was spend half the summer in the basement being chased away by tornadoes. And I was fascinated by these guys who got on television and told us how to save our lives by getting in the basement.

2:25 And I thought, you know, that’s that’s kind of cool. That’s that’s what Superman and Batman and Captain Kirk and, and G.I. Joe are doing. And I wanted to play that too. So I did things like when I was playing by myself, I made new sets with various different things, and it continued on. I sort of lost my interest in broadcast at some point. And the first term paper we had to write in school, when you have to learn how to do footnotes and what all that kind of stuff was. mine was on modern newspaper design. so I was, I was my father was in the business. He was running this newspaper. As a matter of fact, my grandmother was in the business. She retired and came to work at this newspaper. and I didn’t.

3:11 I was always planning, though, to go to college and go off and be a lawyer and an MBA and be some corporate some. Thank God I never did it. I would have hated that. But, I became editor of my campus newspaper, and seeing the effect that journalism had on an actual community firsthand convinced me this is what I really wanted to do forever. So I decided, when I was a senior in college that I forget the law school, forget the MBA stuff. Let’s go off and be a journalist. Can you remember any particular stories that stand out from your time as a college journalist, where you really saw the impact and the bug bit? We probably the best thing we ever did was, one of the nice things about college journalism

3:57 is that very often you have lots of reporters. So I was running as the campus editor before I was editor in chief. I had 75 reporters. there’s stuff you can do with 75 reporters that you can’t do in most newsrooms. And so we sent people out to cover all sorts of beats that we didn’t really we weren’t weren’t really interested in the public school system in town. We really didn’t care about that. But one of the reporters came back with an interesting story, of a special skin area and behavior analysis. headstart program in which children were literally being abused. they were they were forcing these kids to get tokens if they wanted to go to the bathroom.

4:44 And so they just put them in the corner and they were wetting their pants. And if the parents complained about it, they threatened the kids. And there were rumors that they were they were going out and faking their expensive counts. And it was university professors who were involved in this. And we took, a huge number of reporters, as I recall, my associate editor and I, Jeff students. And we spent spring break, I mean, just spring break. We stayed on campus to go through dusty files of expense records from this program and then calling up every place they said they’d gone and ask whether they actually gone there. And we found about $25,000 worth of expense vouchers that they hadn’t put through. And this is back in the early 70s, someone who was

5:29 interning at a Kansas City TV station, WDA, AFF, and somebody who was working for the NPR station on campus. Okay. And you would also become aware of this, and we decided to pool our efforts, and we did this sort of early multimedia, you know, cross media platform. We we timed everything to come out all on the same day, did what was good for broadcast on broadcast, what was good for print, on print, you know, all these other things back in the 70s. And we got two people sent to prison. and that’s kind of when you feel it, you know? Cool. We spoke up for these kids that then these parents that were, that were having trouble that were that were being abused by the system. And we got something done about it.

6:15 And yeah, that that’s a feeling that you can’t turn your back on journalism when you see something like that happen. Well, let’s shift to a compelling story that had you in the middle instead of you as the reporter. It seemed like this should never happen in America. But in August of last year, 2023, police raided your home and the newspaper that you owned there, the Marion County Record. The raid was condemned by Free Press advocates and journalists from around the world, and seen as an effort to intimidate your paper into not publishing a story. Can you walk us through that day? What was that surprise like for you and what was going. Through your mind? It was totally unexpected. I was I was actually sitting at home at the time,

7:04 I lived with my 98 year old mother. I’d come down here to Kansas during Covid. come on. Spring break from the University of Illinois. And I couldn’t go back to Illinois because of Covid. so I taught my classes from actually where I’m sitting right now, using zoom and whatever else. and I did that for the rest of that semester and did it for the next year. And somewhere along the line, I said, enough of this online class crap. It doesn’t work. Well, I’m close enough to retirement age. I’ll just retire in a state. Marion. So I’m staying with my 98 year old mother, and it was getting close to time. Her Meals on Wheels would arrive at about 11:00 in the morning, and I was waiting for her Meals on Wheels to arrive because it was usually

7:52 cold and I heated up for, but, got a knock on the door there, a couple of couple of cops out there that were executing a search warrant. And, I told them at the time that this is, probably not legal, what you’re doing and the we have information about the police chief, which we hadn’t published. And we think this is just retaliation for that. It turns out it was probably was a much more serious retaliation than just that, because they also raided the home of a city councilwoman that same morning, who was an opponent of the mayor. And we had covered her opposition to the mayor. and we believe that it wasn’t just the police chief,

8:38 but it was also the mayor who was out trying to get us and trying to either embarrass us or in the case of the mayor, he had said previously that, the only way I can get rid of her because he tried to get her recalled, couldn’t get it. she, on the other hand, had had over override the, campaigns on some stuff he’d tried to publish and been very successful with him or tried to enact. But, we we thought that, this was an attempt by the mayor to enlist the police chief and some others in a campaign to embarrass us, get her convicted of a crime, throw us out of business, prevent us from publishing. There were discussions at the time about,

9:24 you know, who’s going to be able to publish the legal notices when after they’re raided. And we can’t quite prove all of this yet, but we’ve heard enough of it that we think it was fairly broad reaching. but they raided our office and I tried to call. They took immediately took my cell phone. They took my laptop. They forbade me to touch the desktop computer in the place, and I wanted to call a lawyer. Well, I had his number in my laptop. I had it in my cell phone. I had it on the desktop. And I also had it posted. Actually, it’s still there. It’s right on this wall over here next to my desk. and I now got more than one lawyer’s number over there, but,

10:09 they wouldn’t let us. I went down to the newspaper office. They wouldn’t let us in the office. As it turned out, they they stood at my mother’s house for 2.5 hours, and eventually seven of them came to my mother’s house to take her computer away. They searched her basement, thinking there might be a file server down in the basement. And she’s like, there’s no file server in the basement. There’s clutter. And I’m embarrassed, and I don’t want you to go down there. But they went down there anyway. they took all sorts of things. They took everything that we had to produce the paper with at that time. They threw our staff out of the newsroom. I came down to the newsroom and couldn’t get in. and I finally went to a neighbor, who lives not far away from here. And I said, can I borrow your phone?

10:55 And it turns out he had an old flip phone. yeah. and borrow your iPad to look up our lawyer’s number so we could call here and see what was going on. But they packed up all our material. They took our file server, they took our backup hard drives. They took. We had backups on Blu ray discs. They took all the computers that had Blu ray players on them. So we couldn’t get our any of our backups. We didn’t even have, you know, the newspaper has a nameplate up at the top that says, what’s your name? We didn’t have that. We didn’t have that nameplate anymore. and we had to produce paper. They eventually returned all this, not all this to us. About two hours after we produced that first paper. Afterwards, they could have returned it a little earlier,

11:42 and it might have made it easier for us, but they didn’t. and, they accused us of identity theft. Now, the sad thing is that we had received a tip. Well actually to back up just a little bit, we’d been invited to a meeting, a public forum by a congressman, and got a personal invitation to it. And we went there, and the owner of the coffee shop threw us out. Didn’t want any media in the in the event and threw us out and had the police chief throw us out. In response to this, a woman who knew the coffee shop owner, sent us

12:27 what she thought was some dirt on the coffee shop owner that she had been driving for 20 years without a valid license because she’d had a drunk driving conviction that she’d tried to have diversion, put on two, and never completed the diversion agreement. And the person who gave us the information said, not only has she been doing this for 20 years, local law enforcement are well aware of it and have done nothing to enforce it. So our first thought was we didn’t want to be Dan Rather. We didn’t want to have a fake document in our possession that wasn’t real. So we wanted to verify was it a real document? So we asked her how she got it and she told us how she got it. We went off and tried to find it and we couldn’t find it there. So we eventually called up the the State Department of Motor Vehicles and said, well, how do you get this?

13:16 And they told us how they gave us the instructions on how do you get the document. And, you know, they they knew what we were doing. They knew why we were doing it. so we got the document we looked at. It was legit, but we found from another source that really what was going on here. This bribing leaked by the woman’s estranged husband, who was arguing in their divorce case that he should get all their cars because she didn’t have a valid driver’s license. And we said to ourselves, this is not a story we want to run. So. But we were concerned that cops were not arresting her. So I sent off a note to the sheriff and the police chief saying, we’ve received this document. We aren’t going to do anything with it.

14:01 But there was an allegation made by the woman who sent it to us, who had connections with law enforcement. She’d been a dispatcher. Her husband is a retired state trooper. that the people, the law enforcement was ignoring it and that she might have obtained this record in some way other than the way she told us she did. we did not know at the time that the city councilwoman had also received a copy of this from the same woman and the woman the restaurateur was asking for a, a, liquor permit to sell alcohol in her restaurants. And the city council member sent a copy to the city administrator saying, does this affect her license application, that she has this pending drunk driving conviction?

14:47 And should she be getting a liquor license and the city administrator said, no, that’s for the state to decide. We don’t look into that issue, and I’ve instructed the police department not to follow up on it. The police chief didn’t receive our note until he’d gone home for the weekend. He saw it the first thing the Monday morning after that, and at some point there was some discussion made that involved city council members. The only way they could overrule the city administrator would be if the mayor overruled, even said start an investigation. the police chief started an investigation. It was a shoddy investigation. one of the police officers called the state and said, somebody access this record and they said, yeah, there’s a loophole

15:34 they can get this record through. And and he didn’t even bother to ask who the person was, what their title was. He got false information, said. And right after that, the the restaurant owner access the access. We have a record that that was accessed under her name. So obviously they had faked her name rather than using the name of the reporter, which is what we was on the request for the document. Well, it turns out that all the transactions for a day are loaded as a batch once in the morning, so every transaction had been made that day showed up as sequential, like two minutes apart. and it was different IP numbers. And it was, it was, it was the ex-husband of the woman making the request so real shoddy reporting. They rush out and get a search warrant and,

16:21 wait a few days, how the search warrant. The county attorney said he didn’t read it. The, judge who wasn’t even the judge for here. She’s a magistrate judge from a different county, approved it. We don’t know why the judge from this county wasn’t here and didn’t approve it. we’ve asked whether she ever saw it. They won’t tell us whether she ever saw the request. The we. There was a complaint issued. Not by us, but by somebody else against a magistrate judge for approving the search warrant. The state sent a note back saying, well, judges have almost total immunity to their action. and we don’t say that we would have agreed with pursuing the warrant, but we have sent her advice that in the future we recommend that she reads things before she signs them.

17:08 and they there was a complaint made against the county attorney, and it was sent back and said, well, he didn’t do anything wrong. He has immunity. most county attorneys actually read search warrants before they send them to judges, but they’re not required to do so. That’s okay. so, kind of a catch 22 situation and trying to get culpability for this. so they rate our office and take all of our stuff and we put out a paper. eventually the county attorney prodded by some state officials, decides on the Monday after the raid that, oh, shoot, there wasn’t probable cause for this search to ever exist. And so he makes a request, but wait until Wednesday to do it, to, remove the search warrants and return all the devices to us.

17:58 They had made a copy of our hard drive, which he didn’t want to return to us. It was something that was added to the seized inventory after they gave us a copy of it. We only found it accidentally, and then they didn’t want to return it to us. And, they started going through. Well, we should have the judge review it in camera, and, and a judge finally sat down and said, read my original note. It said, return everything now. And so for the judge, they actually smashed the hard drive. and we had the sheriff and the undersheriff with a hammer and chisel come in and take a little hard drive and smash into little pieces. So we have a bag of pieces of a hard drive. That is the return of that. and thereafter it’s just been a roller coaster of,

18:45 legal affairs and and, still pending, likely to be pending for years to come. Lawsuits? Yeah. So a remarkable story. And I’ve going through all that details, sobering in itself. What happened inside you, just as is you’re watching all this go on. What were you thinking as kind of a, what, animated your actions at that point? Then, you know, I will tell you. And you don’t think you just. You just do. I mean, you know, first of all, you know, in your soul, this is wrong. You’re not supposed to do this. so I told them at the time, I said I said two things to them that were low perfection.

19:32 This is going to be a huge lawsuit. You’re going to be sued, and you’re going to be on the front page of The New York Times. And they laughed at that. And of course, they were on the front page three times. But we had a huge lawsuit against them, multiple huge lawsuits against them. But basically you go you you revert to your training and you do what you’re supposed to do, which is you aurally challenge them. You do not physically challenge them, otherwise they will try to have you arrested. By the way, they tried to have my mother arrested. My 98 year old mother arrested. and I didn’t mention that part of the story, which I really should have. my mother was so distraught about this, she. The 2.5 hours,

20:17 she had to sit there with the cops and watch them ransacking her house. She would not eat that night. She would not drink water. She would not go to bed. She sat in a chair in the living room till about six in the morning, and then finally went to bed. I let her sleep till a little afternoon, and I woke her up at that point and said, you really? You didn’t need anything yesterday. You need to have something to eat. all through the the raid, she kept telling them she was very get out of my house. she said some said some great lines to the people of appreciated. you know, she was telling the cops, do you have a mother? Do you love your mother? Does your mother love you? And, what you’re doing is wrong. And Gestapo Hitler tactics.

21:04 She really laid into it. and she one time approached one of the cops with her walker, and the cop involved wanted to have her charged with interfering with law enforcement. Aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer for attacking her with a wet walker. Well, we’ve got video of it. I mean, one of the nice things is we didn’t have to wait for bodycam. I had a camera in that house in case she fell or something. And so we had video ourselves of what went on in there. And she’s not threatening them. but the cop, by the way, who threatened, who threatened to have her arrested is now the interim police chief in Marion. So we’re not rid of these people. The the the the notion. What did we do at the time that’s automatic.

21:51 We put out a newspaper. We took us to all nighters. we just did what we’re going to do. That’s that’s programing. That’s that’s muscle memory. You just do it because that’s what you’re going to do. The if there’s heroism, if there’s things courage, the courage is we put out the paper last week with the same sheriff, the same county attorney, the same judge, the the interim police chief. Now, who not only did that, but he was the one in searching our newsroom who went through a reporter’s desk, a reporter who wasn’t even here when the identity theft happened. She was sick that week, had nothing to do with the story. He searched, searched all of her files and found she was the one who had had the dirt on the police chief that we didn’t use because we couldn’t get documentary sources.

22:37 We only had two sources who were related to each other. We actually had more than two, but they were all related, and we weren’t going to run it until we found an independent source that said that this guy, who had been the police captain in Kansas City, earning $120,000 a year, suddenly decides he wants to go to Marion to be the police chief for $60,000 a year. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense until you realize that he was pending the motion for sexual improprieties and other things that he had done, and the Kansas City Police Department, and we had that information. We just didn’t have it nailed down to the point that we thought we could publish it. But in going through the desks, the guy who’s now the interim police chief found that file, called the police chief over so that he could read it in page.

23:26 One of that was the printout of the LinkedIn profile of our main source. So he now knew who gave the information to it. So anyway, back to my mother. She was, I got her up at around noon on Saturday, and, said, you haven’t eaten. She went to the bathroom. She came back to bed. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed, and I said, do you want to eat here and let me make some breakfast for you, get you some coffee, get you something or other. You want to have it here in the in your bedroom? You want to go into the family room? You ought to eat at the kitchen table, just as I don’t know. I don’t feel to be dropped over dead. She died in the middle of that sentence. the coroner came and said it was the stress of the raid.

24:14 other experts have described it as broken hearts and romance, fairly common among elderly people. That if they believe that she worked at the newspaper for 60 years, she was still working there at the time, 98 years old. She did a column of memories for us. if you believe that everything about your life was meaningless. And you’re an old person, you often die of sudden cardiac arrest. And that’s what happened to her. She spent most of the evening where all the good people, where all the good people who were supposed to stop this, well, they came it just took them a few days to get there. We got a huge outpouring of support. you mentioned earlier that that all the media organizations rallied around us, and we appreciate that.

25:01 We’re very grateful for that. But that’s not what we’re extremely grateful for. It wasn’t the media organization rallying around us that we cared about. It was the people we heard from tens of thousands of just average ordinary citizens. You know, steam fitters, union executives, politicians, law enforcement officers, and a very large number, just, you know, retirees, schoolteachers, nurses, whatever. Tens of thousands of them sent us supportive email messages. Thousands of them actually subscribed to our newspaper from all over the United States. So we have our circulation tripled, as a result of this thing, most of them subscribing online only, but,

25:49 and 100% of the notes we received were supported and they were coming from everywhere on the political spectrum. I like to recount the story that I was going through them one day, and I never got a chance to answer all of them because it was 10,000. you can’t do it now. And we’d lost our computers. So most of this was like, ganged up in this big pile of messages that we finally got two weeks and weeks later. But I was going through it weeks and weeks later, and I was looking, you know, clicking next to the things. And I’m so sorry for what they did to you. That must have been the damn Republicans did it. And I click next and it says, I’m so sorry for what they did. You it must have been those damn Democrats. I mean, it was coming from every side of the political spectrum conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, and they were all saying the same thing.

26:35 And these days, to find an issue on which people of both parties and all political aspects agree on is is rare. But they were agreeing on that this was wrong. This was just wrong. I think there’s a the there’s a sentiment of the public. There’s a segment of the public that probably thinks journalism’s out and outmoded concept, and it’s technologically out of date and it’s which none of which is true, and that it lies and that, you know, fake news, fake news, fake news, but even the fake news, people thought this was wrong. and fundamentally, I think they understand that there’s an important role that the media, the news coverage plays

27:23 in, in democracy and that this is just not American. I we were lucky enough. One of the awards we received is the Maria Ressa Award for Courage in Journalism from University of Maryland. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize winning journalist from the Philippines, was there and I got to have lunch with her, and she’d been following our story from Manila, and I asked her enough questions, and I know she listened to it on the first day before my mother died. Then she’d listened to it on the second day after my mother died, and she’d really been following it very closely. She said to me, says, you know, this is the most discouraging thing about it was we in the rest of the world had always looked to the United States as our beacon of liberty and hope. And this is the kind of crap that goes on in our third world countries.

28:09 And here it’s happening in the United States. And that was very depressing to us. And I’d had a grad student from Egypt. In fact, we’d done a paper together for a convention about the repressive control of the media in Egypt and how the media had adjusted to it. A little tactic they called incremental reporting. They’d report a little tiny bit of a story, and they wait a while and report a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, and they had to do it slowly, otherwise the government would come cracking down on them and raid their newsroom. Well, we did a paper on that and thought how awful that was. But that’s what happened in Kansas. That’s what happened in Marion, Kansas. Does it happen everywhere? It happens more than you think. One of the unusual things about us is

28:57 we’re not the only place this has happened to. We’re the place you’ve heard about. You’ve heard about it partly because we are a little different than other places. You know, I don’t take a salary here. I work 80 hours a week and don’t get paid, but I, you know, but I’m retired. I’ve got plenty of income. I don’t I don’t need this. This is not why I’m doing this is not my livelihood. And I will not object to somebody who has whose livelihood depends on it that they, you know, they got to feed their kids. I got to get them through college. They can’t challenge everything as fully as you need to. I’ve been in that position. I remember sitting in an in a news in the newsroom when an editor was making a decision that I didn’t think was good, and my boss at the time didn’t think it was good.

29:44 I was a new father who had a six week old baby. And the my boss said, well, if you do this, I’m going to resign. And he did. And I’m like, looking at me and, okay, I can’t resign right now. You know, I just, I just can’t do it. But now this year the the tail is turned on this. I’m now in the position where I don’t have to, you know, somebody wants to boycott me and put no ads in this newspaper. That’s fine. We’ll live with it. We’ll figure we’ll figure out a way to make it work, because my financial livelihood doesn’t depend on it. And, so you’re hearing about this one a little more than you might hear about some others. Are you, you put together and that issue right after the raid happened and you got it out anyway

30:31 with kind of a headline that went around the world, seized but not silenced. Yeah, that just that that was a headline that just came to me. I don’t know why. and I’m a, I’m a longtime headline writer. So I come up with headlines, but, it was important to establish the notion that that we were not giving up there. There are some other sayings that, you know, we I said at the time, we’re going to publish come hell or high water. there’s no way that if if, if we had to take post-it notes and hand write the news on it and stand them on people’s doors, we were going to publish a newspaper that way that we just there was no no way. We weren’t going to publish. you can’t be, you know, when you’re confronted with bullies,

31:18 you can either bow to them or you can stand up to them. And most of the time, if you stand up to bullies, they go away and you just have to realize that there’s a minute that you it’s going to be difficult when you’re standing up to them, but standing up to them is a lot better than than rolling over, because the next time it’s going to be something worse, and the next time, you know they want your lunch money this time and they’re going to want your, you know, want your car and your house the next time. so you have to kind of stand up to bullies. And that’s what we wanted to do. I mean, that’s what newspapers are supposed to do. That’s our role in democracy. Well, you’ve certainly set an example. And if it’s all right, I’d like to wrap up with a couple of questions about that example and your thoughts for a rising generation

32:07 who might be interested in the path that you’ve taken, you’ve had a chance to teach journalism in a college setting. What were the most important couple of lessons that you wanted students to absorb above anything else. When you taught? I’ll tell you what the mission of journalism is important that you’re out there. You know, it was it was offered originally as a as an insult to Chicago journalists that you you comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable that was actually supposed to be an insult, but it’s actually a pretty good definition of what we do in journalism. you have to have a soul. You have to care about the community you’re living in. one of the reasons why journalism is typically attracts

32:52 more underrepresented groups to it than most other professions do is because I think a lot of those people in those groups have that passion that they need. They need they understand that there’s a community that needs their services and they want to be heard, right. They want to be heard. They want they you need to give a voice to the voiceless and and make sure that this is not stridency. And most people don’t understand this who are not in the business. I, I am very Jeffersonian. I believe that if the public has all the information, most of the time they’ll make the right decision now, not all the time. And it might not be the decision that I would make. And honestly, I don’t care. Most people don’t think that’s true.

33:38 They think, well, you write editorials and you care what the what they’re going to do. Well, I care, but I’m not trying to push an opinion down anybody’s throat. I just want you to have all the information. Make up your mind yourselves. You might be right, you might be wrong. But at least you knew that you had the information going in. and it’s important for people that for students to understand that that’s what you’re doing. The challenge that most students face is the ability to go up to people and ask them questions. You just be willing to look stupid, to ask a dumb question that you don’t. You know you have to, and to talk to people who aren’t like you. I mean, that’s but that’s also the beauty of it.

34:26 I mean, part of the and go to a town that you don’t know anything about. I’ve got a job applicant coming in next week. Who who’s graduated from the University of Chicago. Okay. Not exactly a a major melting pot. had gone to a very prestigious private school in New York. as for undergrad, lived in New York City, has probably never seen a town as small as this. he’s coming out to to to come to a town like this, that will be good for him. If he comes to this town, it’d be good to experience a place that you’ve never felt like to. To be part of a flyover state when you’ve flown over it so many times, or to go to some other place, you go interview people. I remember interviewing somebody and in a small town and,

35:14 and they were so proud of their accomplishments. He’s in management. And I said, well, what do you manage? I’m the assistant manager at Burger King. Well, you know, I mean, but in the mindset of the people involved, you have to put yourself in those shoes and understand that it’s a big accomplishment for those people that were there doing that. and just being a sociologist, you know, being being the, the, the Margaret Mead of the, of your society, just for your own personal edification. I mean, I understand this is a time in which liberal arts education is not looked on with a great degree of support. People are renaming liberal arts colleges as arts colleges rather than liberal, because they don’t like the word liberal is, to them, a negative term.

36:05 understand that knowledge is knowledge is important. And this is the business. This is the business you’re in, and journalism is the knowledge business. finding information. And you’ve got to be willing to go up to people who you don’t know, who may look scary or may look intimidating, or may look like you don’t like them, and ask them a question that they may find stupid and and but do enough research so that you don’t do that intentionally. You’re not just going up and saying, you know, what do you think about global warming to a scientist who does studies on global warming? Do do some research and figure it out, and revel in that research. One of the little things I learned one day teaching,

36:54 I was making reference. I said, I don’t know whether anybody knows about this, but there’s a stupid show on TV. It’s on one of the discovery channels or something. It’s called how it’s made, and it’s a Canadian show, and it’s like spends five minutes about, you know, why potato chips come in. The bags are only half full and and how you make corn flakes and and the people around the class, they all watched it. All the good journalism students had watched it because it’s sort of this meaningless knowledge that that you can get quickly. And maybe you’re going to use it someplace in the future. But it’s it’s the love of acquiring information and then sharing it with other people. And if you’ve got that, you need to be in journalism. because that’s a job that that’s what it does.

37:40 That’s that’s the joy of telling people things that they didn’t know. and finding out things that are important for them to know and then letting them know and taking that thrill and figuring out at the end of the day, you’ve done more for democracy than most of the people who were elected to offices, have done. And, that’s a good feeling. It’s a really good feeling. And even though I was fascinated with journalism, I didn’t get that till I was a senior in college. So I went out there and actually did journalism in a community that I was identified with, my campus newspaper. and I recommend to students that they, they get that experience. They work in a community that they’re part of,

38:27 that they can feel that coming out and they’ll be hooked. They’ll be hooked for life. It’s not about writing. It’s not about photography. It’s not about design. It’s not about being, you know, having the best hairdo and doing the news on camera. it’s about what you do for democracy. Well, I think that’s a perfect note to end on. And, Eric, you you and your mother and what you’ve all done together at the Marion County Record, certainly, I think are going to leave a legacy for our country and its legacy of freedom and the humane legacy, what we share together as neighbors and citizens. So I want to thank you for what you’ve shared with us today.