The humble Marion Country Record, a local newspaper in the rural Kansas county, became quite famous when, in August of 2023, police raided their offices and two of the homes of people associated with the newspaper. At the time, co-owner, editor, and publisher Eric Meyer had no idea why any of this was happening. As Seized shows, the reasoning for the raid — which the paper’s tireless team was bound to find out eventually — was altogether ridiculous. The saddest part of all of this was that Meyers’ elderly but sharp mother Joan, herself a co-owner of the paper, passed away the day after the raid, the stress of the event clearly not helping. The story serves as a microcosm of what is happening today to independent, non-profit, and for-profit journalism alike in this country. Intimidation can be a powerful tool, but it seems you can’t intimidate Eric Meyer.
Structurally, the documentary plays out somewhat like a mystery, because the ways in which the talking-head interviews are spliced together keep the reasons for the raid hidden until the full scope of the farce can be explained. Essentially, a group of individuals, including the then-Mayor of Marion and the then-police chief, were looking for any excuse to silence the paper. This was because, as the film explores, you could reasonably accuse Meyer and his staff of simply being gossips a lot of the time, especially in such a small town. However, when elected officials cloak their own self-interest in that of the people, as a few do here, it alway seems shady to me. This was not a noble effort to curb some muckrakers run amok. This was a trampling of the first amendment.
Again however, Seized (which takes its title from the paper’s first headline after the event) does its own journalistic due diligence in showing pretty much every shade of opinion about the Record around the town. Those who dislike the paper will tell you that everyone in town agrees with them. Those who love the paper will tell you that everyone in town agrees with them. As is usually the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Director Sharon Liese clearly leans more toward supporting Meyer’s version of events, but I think it’d be pretty hard not to as an outsider, and again, she does give every perspective fairly comparable airtime.
To continue in the journalism theme, perhaps I’ve buried the lead somewhat. Seized also has an eye to the bigger issues facing journalism with its own audience avatar. Finn, a young reporter fresh out of college from New York comes to work at the Record as his first job in news. We see his year-long stint with the paper and are introduced to many of the characters in the story through his eyes. As each of them continue to follow the story in which they were victimized, the ethics and fortitude required of them are tested. Meyer may be a tough cookie, but he is a fearless leader, and it seems as though Finn and everyone else involved has learned a great deal from him. As one local illuminates when he says that his friend doesn’t subscribe to the paper on principle but secretly reads his wife’s copies, good journalism is so inherently necessary to a functioning society that its importance seems automatically ingrained in our brains. | George Napper
Seized was featured at the 2026 St. Louis International Film Festival. Further information about the Festival, which runs Nov. 5-15, is available on the festival website.
