This is an opinion column.

A friend of mine sent me a text the other day, linking a national story about the arrest of a reporter and publisher in Atmore, a town in south Alabama known best for death row and gambling.

“Worse than Kansas,” was all the text said.

My first thought was … “Do we have a new state motto?”

Nah. I’ve been to Kansas.

But the truth is, I don’t know what’s going on in Atmore. Not really. I hate to say it.

I’d like to rail against District Attorney Steve Billy with all the indignation I can muster. And I can muster a lot.

After all, he had a reporter – 69-year-old Don Fletcher – arrested last week, charged with disclosing information protected by grand jury secrecy. Billy charged the reporter after Fletcher wrote a story revealing that Billy had subpoenaed records about the school board’s use of federal COVID relief money.

The arrest was disturbing.

Press advocacy groups and 1st Amendment lawyers have called the charges unprecedented, because, while it’s against the law for someone inside the grand jury to tell somebody what happened there, it has never been against the law to hear it, or to report it. It is not a crime to simply report that an investigation exists, or that subpoenas have been issued.

READ THE LAW HERE

I’ve spent many days standing outside grand jury rooms waiting to see who shows up to testify. It is standard practice in this state.

So on its face it is repugnant to see a reporter charged with a crime for attempting to tell his community what is going on in its public buildings, with its public money, in the pursuit of public interest. It stinks.

But there is a lot about this Atmore case that stinks.

It stinks that Fletcher’s boss Sherry Digmon, the publisher of the Atmore News, sits on the Escambia County Board of Education.

It stinks that a press freedom issue is commingled with her other troubling problems, including accompanying charges that Digmon used her position on the board for financial gain at her publications.

It stinks that DA Billy has seemingly gone into a shell – his office said he was out for a few days and would not be addressing the issue – rather than explaining his actions or the reasons for the serious, constitutional question of the charges against Fletcher.

It stinks that Atmore is a soap opera, that politics and small-town feuds turn black and white to gray.

So there is a lot I don’t know, or can’t prove, or don’t trust. So I can’t say if Atmore is worse than Kansas, where cops in August searched the The Marion County Record, among other places, confiscating phones, computers and more, a search authorities later admitted was unfounded.

RELATED: School Board Association questions timing of arrest

It is important to be clear that everything is not clear. Especially in a world that seems reluctant to take threats against journalists seriously.

What we do know is that government officials across the globe are more comfortable threatening journalists now than ever before. We do know, thanks to the Committee to Protect Journalists, that 363 journalists were imprisoned across the world at the end of last year. That was the most ever counted.

Most were in places like China and Belarus, in Myanmar or countries where strongmen silence their critics with the threat of jail, or prison, or a bullet to the back of the head.

But threats, physical, legal and financial, have come far more often in this country since politicians and political strategists sought to protect themselves and their interests by labeling journalists the “enemy of the people.”

I don’t know exactly what is going on in Atmore. But I do know the enemy of the people is any leader who wants to keep the public’s business from the public.

I could say it myself, but Thomas Jefferson – who had some real issues with things newspapers wrote about him – said it better.

“The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Edward Carrington, a delegate to the Continental Congress. “To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Or to put it in more modern parlance, don’t hate the messenger. Hate when there is no message.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.