The McCurtain Gazette and the Marion County Record are portraits of a past media age. Eric Meyer bought the Record in 1998 to prevent it from being sold to a corporate buyer; his father had worked there from 1948 until he retired. Bruce Willingham, owner of the Gazette, has been in the newspaper business a half-century. At a time when local journalism is collapsing, these papers are time capsules and community pillars – chronicling hailstorms and hog farming, rodeos and local officials taking from the till.

Recently, both papers have been in the news themselves. Local officials in Marion, Kansas, raided the Record and Mr. Meyer’s home last Friday, confiscating computers, cellphones, and reporting materials. Mr. Meyer’s mother, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, died hours after the raid. The warrant for the search, since dismissed by state authorities, alleged that the Record had illegally obtained sensitive information about a member of the community.

The Gazette, meanwhile, secretly recorded local officials in the Oklahoma county talking about their desire to hire hit men to kill the newspaper’s staff, which had run repeated exposés on police department morale and malfeasance. The extraordinary story is in The New Yorker. 

According to the World Press Freedom Index, the United States is No. 45 of 180 nations – in the “satisfactory” zone, though dropping. But things feel worse. Violence against the press is growing; trust is declining. 

Historians suggest that violence against the press is not new and corresponds with periods of intense partisanship. As the media landscape fractures from huge corporate entities serving millions to serving niche audiences, news becomes seen less as a fair arbiter and more as partisan itself. 

Where does it stop? State authorities in Oklahoma and Kansas have taken steps to rein in local officials. The Record, for example, will be getting its equipment back. But thousands of miles away in India, a journalist connected with the Monitor has been in jail for more than a year, simply for refusing to toe the government line. In America, two tiny storefront papers on the Great Plains are essential to ensuring the U.S. doesn’t tip into that same darkness.