Murder The Truth

 

David Enrich, “Murder The Truth: Fear, The First Amendment, And A Secret Campaign To Protect The Powerful (Large Print Edition), Mariner Large Print, 2025, 456  pp. 

This is an important book.  It is only through States' anti-SLAPP laws that the public has a chance of the Supreme Decision in Sullivan v NYT remaining.  Wisconsin does not have a SLAPP law.

Review by the Washington Post’s Quinta Jurecic

In December, a month before Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time, ABC News reached a settlement with the soon-to-be president over a defamation lawsuit he had filed against the network. The news was surprising. Though Trump’s complaint focused on a genuine misstatement by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, the network would have had a strong defense if it had chosen to go to trial, thanks to hefty legal protections under the First Amendment. Nevertheless, ABC folded. Then, days later, Trump filed another suit — this one against the Des Moines Register, claiming fraud over the Iowa paper’s publication of an outlier poll just days ahead of the presidential election that showed Kamala Harris with a lead over Trump in the state, which he ended up winning by 13 points. (The Iowa paper fought, and the case was abandoned by Trump in 2025, after an expensive lawsuit).

Trump has always been litigious. But as David Enrich explores, this personal strategy is part of a much broader legal and political campaign to use the courts as a cudgel against press freedoms — both by browbeating news outlets with the promise of litigation and by working to strip away key protections that make it possible for the press to publish coverage that is critical of those in power. With the new administration already seizing every opportunity to strong-arm the press, and with stiff spines in short supply among leaders of major media organizations, “Murder the Truth” makes for an unfortunately urgent warning.

Enrich, the business investigations editor for the New York Times and the author of two previous books examining the less-than-savory interaction of money and power — at Deutsche Bank and the powerhouse law firm Jones Day — here turns his eye to the ugly mechanics of defamation litigation. The story, as he tells it, is one of threats and bluster but also of “quiet censorship”: all the critical reporting that will never be written, and all the news organizations that have shuttered, because of the looming, potentially ruinous cost of litigation.

For the past 60 years, American journalists have been protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, which set a high constitutional bar for defamation cases. To successfully sue, “public figures” — people with a presence in public life, like government officials or celebrities — must show not only that a journalist published a falsehood, but that they did so knowingly or with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Enrich, like many, views Sullivan as an “indispensable safeguard” that allows journalists the breathing room to report without having to worry that an honest mistake will put them out of business. This is exactly why the lawyers and litigants at the heart of his book are trying to do away with it.

Until recently, Sullivan was “something close to American gospel,” Enrich writes — a case revered even by conservative, originalist judges. But in the past six years, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have both called for it to be reconsidered, arguing that the precedent allows what they see as a rampaging press “to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity,” in the words of an influential conservative appeals judge quoted by Thomas. Enrich traces this sudden “onset of hostility” toward Sullivan, chiefly from the right, to a comment Trump made at a 2016 campaign event about the need to “open up our libel laws.” In Enrich’s telling, that casual suggestion was a spark that found dry kindling in long-cultivated right-wing resentments toward the media, igniting interest within elite legal circles in launching a direct assault on Sullivan. Trump’s constant broadsides against the press, Enrich writes, provided a rhetorical basis for these lawyers to “justify the curtailment of long-standing press freedoms.”

Enrich himself seems puzzled by how rapidly many conservative lawyers turned against Sullivan, and his account left me wishing for more detail on the intellectual and ideological roots of this shift. The book is at its strongest when Enrich puts his reporting chops to work in tracing how this effort has played out in practice, both at the upstart law firms itching to take a crack at the media and among the journalists on the other side of those attacks. Overturning Sullivan requires engineering a case that could wend all the way to the Supreme Court — and the result is a lot of litigation against the press, to increase the odds of finding such a case. “Murder the Truth” is stuffed full of anecdotes about opportunistic bullies taking advantage of this movement in an effort to scare journalists away from critical coverage.

This is a story not just about political and legal shifts, but about the power of money. An uneasy undercurrent running through the book traces the seeming presence of hidden, wealthy benefactors who are willing to pour money into this harassing litigation. The model here, Enrich argues, is the successful behind-the-scenes effort by tech billionaire Peter Thiel to bankrupt Gawker by funding endless lawsuits against the publication. The most compelling figures in “Murder the Truth,” meanwhile, are the beleaguered writers at small, poorly funded publications who struggle under the weight of legal fees and the rising costs of defamation insurance — costs that are sometimes enough to put these publications out of business, even if they eventually triumph in court. “Every time I write a story,” one writer frets to Enrich, “I have to think, Will I get sued over this?”

Still, underfunded journalists determined to fight as long as they can make for an unflattering contrast with the far more moneyed outlets and media owners who, since the months leading up to the 2024 election, have taken actions that appear aligned with Trump’s thin-skinned vision of press freedoms. Last fall, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, and Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, pulled endorsements of Harris that their editorial boards had planned to publish. Bezos more recently announced that The Post’s opinion pages would advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish viewpoints opposing those principles. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook would get rid of its fact-checkers, who had become “too politically biased.”

“Murder the Truth” ends with a twist of sorts. One of the crusading law firms profiled by Enrich notches a major win against an irresponsible network recklessly peddling falsehoods. But the network in question is Fox News, and the lie in question was the so-called “big lie” of 2020 election fraud. The nearly $800 million litigation settlement between Fox and Dominion Voting Systems was a demonstration that Sullivan still works: The high standard for defamation shields good-faith reporting while leaving room to hold careless or malicious actors to account. But awkwardly for the Trump-aligned lawyers gunning for Sullivan, the malicious actors tend to be on the president’s side. Trump may have launched the movement to do away with Sullivan, but given his proclivity for aggressively attacking his opponents without reference to truth, he will probably wind up far more vulnerable to litigation if the Supreme Court weakens or abandons the precedent.

Quinta Jurecic, a Book World contributing writer, is a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

My Notes:

Pg. 84:  The media has become for the Right what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War—a common, unifying adversary of overwhelming importance.

Pg. 126:  Thanks to Charles Harder and his successful lawsuit against Gawker, which had published a sex-video with Hulk Hogan, a movement to transform libel law would go from being a backwater  to a bustling growth business. 

Pg. 175:  More than 2,500 newspapers in the US have stopped publishing in the past two decades, a rate of about two per week.  Most counties in the US are no longer home to any daily papers, and many surviving outlets have been gutted by layoffs and other cost-cutting.  Seventy million Americans live in what researchers have dubbed “news deserts.”   When no one is monitoring city council or school board meetings, civic engagement withers, politics polarize, and taxes go up. 

Pg. 358:  Wisconsin, unlike dozens of other states, doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law to deter people from filing suits designed to stifle public debate.

A SLAPP lawsuit, or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, is a legal action intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the costs of legal defense. These lawsuits are often filed against individuals or organizations that voice opinions publicly, aiming to suppress advocacy efforts and discourage free speech. SLAPP suits typically lack legitimate legal claims and are designed to punish critics for expressing their views on matters of public interest.