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David Enrich<\/strong> serves as The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>\u2019 business investigations editor, overseeing a small team of reporters focused on business and law. But since the 2024 presidential election, he\u2019s been busy doing reporting of his own on Donald Trump<\/strong>\u2019s lawsuits against media entities, including ABC<\/a>, CBS<\/a>, The Des Moines Register<\/a>,<\/em> and the Pulitzer board<\/a>, and the threats<\/a> to editorial independence at Voice of America. He also had the cover story<\/a> in The<\/em> New York Times Magazine<\/em> this past weekend, which was adapted from his new book<\/a> and accompanied by an ominous headline: \u201cCan the Media\u2019s Right to Pursue the Powerful Survive Trump\u2019s Second Term?\u201d<\/p>\n That book\u2014Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful<\/em>\u2014got 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\u2019s long demonized the media\u2014and whether the conservative-majority Supreme Court could upend libel laws in America.<\/p>\n The idea for the book, Enrich tells me, came when he noticed the Times<\/em> \u201cgetting besieged with threatening letters\u201d from lawyers on stories concerning powerful people, leading him to realize this was happening more and more to outlets large and small. \u201cI just kept hearing story after story after story about journalists being harassed, bullied, intimidated,\u201d he says, and litigation (or threats of litigation) was \u201cso bad that they were being forced to make a choice between either risking their very existence or backing down off of stories.\u201d<\/p>\n In Murder the Truth,<\/em> 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.<\/em> In that 1964 case<\/a>, 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 \u201cactual malice.\u201d Enrich digs into a number of cases, including Sarah Palin<\/strong>\u2019s ongoing suit against his employer over a 2017 editorial, a winding legal saga covered in this Vanity Fair<\/em> excerpt<\/a>.<\/p>\n The fate of Sullivan<\/em> rests in the hands of a Supreme Court that has not shied away from dismissing long-standing precedent, as it did<\/a> in the 2022 Dobbs<\/em> decision that killed Roe v. Wade.<\/em> So far two justices, Clarence Thomas<\/strong> and Neil Gorsuch,<\/strong> 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\u2019 chipping away at Sullivan,<\/em> which Enrich sees as more likely than their overturning it completely, \u201chas the potential to have really deep, chilling effects on the media\u2019s ability to investigate rich and powerful people.\u201d It\u2019s important, he says, for journalists to cover such people at \u201ca local, state, and national level without being worried that if they make an innocent mistake and screw something up inadvertently, they\u2019re going to get sued into oblivion.\u201d<\/p>\n