David Enrich serves as The New York Times’ business investigations editor, overseeing a small team of reporters focused on business and law. But since the 2024 presidential election, he’s been busy doing reporting of his own on Donald Trump’s lawsuits against media entities, including ABC, CBS, The Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer board, and the threats to editorial independence at Voice of America. He also had the cover story in The New York Times Magazine this past weekend, which was adapted from his new book and accompanied by an ominous headline: “Can the Media’s Right to Pursue the Powerful Survive Trump’s Second Term?”
That book—Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful—got underway a couple of years before Trump returned to power, but it now feels especially timely in the current political climate, amid questions of whether owners of newspapers and TV networks will stand up to a president who’s long demonized the media—and whether the conservative-majority Supreme Court could upend libel laws in America.
The idea for the book, Enrich tells me, came when he noticed the Times “getting besieged with threatening letters” from lawyers on stories concerning powerful people, leading him to realize this was happening more and more to outlets large and small. “I just kept hearing story after story after story about journalists being harassed, bullied, intimidated,” he says, and litigation (or threats of litigation) was “so bad that they were being forced to make a choice between either risking their very existence or backing down off of stories.”
In Murder the Truth, Enrich reports on a conservative legal movement that has targeted news organizations and, in particular, the landmark legal case that underpins libel law in the United States: New York Times v. Sullivan. In that 1964 case, the bar for defamation was set at journalists having acted in reckless disregard for the facts or having knowingly spread false information, a standard known as “actual malice.” Enrich digs into a number of cases, including Sarah Palin’s ongoing suit against his employer over a 2017 editorial, a winding legal saga covered in this Vanity Fair excerpt.
The fate of Sullivan rests in the hands of a Supreme Court that has not shied away from dismissing long-standing precedent, as it did in the 2022 Dobbs decision that killed Roe v. Wade. So far two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have signaled a desire to revisit the libel standard, but only four are needed to bring a case before the high court. Even the justices’ chipping away at Sullivan, which Enrich sees as more likely than their overturning it completely, “has the potential to have really deep, chilling effects on the media’s ability to investigate rich and powerful people.” It’s important, he says, for journalists to cover such people at “a local, state, and national level without being worried that if they make an innocent mistake and screw something up inadvertently, they’re going to get sued into oblivion.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: What jumps out first to me from this book is it feels especially well-timed given the media lawsuits that have been playing out recently involving Donald Trump and several media and tech companies, and we can get to that in a minute. But tell me first about the genesis of this book.
David Enrich: I run a small team of investigative reporters at the Times, and I think it was around 2022 that I started noticing that it seemed like basically every time we were starting to dig into a powerful person or institution, [we] were getting besieged with threatening letters from lawyers representing those people. And it just seemed like it was happening every time.
I started asking around among colleagues at the Times and my previous employer, The Wall Street Journal, and they were noticing the same trend. And it just got me wondering what effect that might be having on smaller news outlets and independent publishers and independent journalists…. I went to the press associations in all 50 states and just asked them what they were seeing. That led me to be introduced to a lot of local journalists and media lawyers all over the country. And I just kept hearing story after story after story about journalists being harassed, bullied, intimidated, and often sued out of existence—or at least the threats were so bad, and litigation was so bad, that they were being forced to make a choice between either risking their very existence or backing down off of stories that, for whatever reason, struck them as really important.
I also started noticing that some of the lawyers that were most prolific at sending these letters and filing lawsuits—at the same time they were doing that, [they] were also increasingly loudly and successfully pushing for New York Times v. Sullivan to be overturned or narrowed, which obviously would make it easier for such lawsuits to succeed and for such intimidation tactics to be effective, and also would improve the business model of these lawyers and make what they do a lot more lucrative.
