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Small towns have been big news lately.
First, proverbially, with the controversial country-music hit "Try That in a Small Town," Jason Aldean's paean to patriotism and how "around here we take care of our own." The anthem, anathema to many who hear violent and racial overtones, has become just the latest flash point in this country's culture wars.
And then literally last Friday in an incident that seemed to consolidate, not convulse, the country: an Aug. 11 police raid on the Marion County Record's newsroom and the newspaper publisher's home, seizing material and machinery, purportedly as part of an investigation into how the paper received and managed information about a local restaurateur's 2008 drunk-driving conviction.
The aggressive tactics, very rare in America, were a metaphorical shock to the publisher and the public in Marion and beyond. Tragically, it may have been a literal shock to the publisher's 98-year-old mother and co-owner of the Record, who died just hours after the raid on her home.
Obliterating the oblique big-city/small-town lines, press-advocacy organizations sprung to action, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which on behalf of 34 news-media entities condemned the raid, questioned its legality and called for the immediate return of seized materials.
"Press freedom is an American value," Gabe Rottman, director of the Technology and Press Freedom Project at the Reporters Committee, said in an interview. "If you're engaged in public discourse, at whatever point in the ideological spectrum, you want those protections in place."