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To tell the truth: David Enrich on the right wing’s battle against the press

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception · Mark Yarm · Last updated March 12, 2025 – 4:16 AM

In 2022, David Enrich, the business investigations editor at the New York Times, began noticing a dramatic increase in the volume and frequency of legal threats against his team. “I talked to a bunch of colleagues, both at the Times and at my previous employer, the Wall Street Journal, who also had the same anecdotal sense that this was happening a lot more,” he tells Depth Perception.

Upon further investigation, Enrich found that journalists all over the country “were also getting inundated with threats and actual lawsuits, and that they were having a really kind of debilitating effect, often on their ability to do their job.” He realized that there was a bigger story to be told, about what he describes as “a concerted right wing campaign” to either overturn or narrow U.S. Supreme Court precedents — including the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision — that protect journalists from abusive lawsuits.

This movement is the subject of his compelling (and often concerning) new book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. Enrich recently spoke to Depth Perception about the ongoing efforts to erode press protections, his own journalistic biases, and how much it sucks getting sued. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

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At the outset of the book, you admit to being biased because you believe in your profession’s “fundamental mission: to inform the public and hold the powerful to account.” What measures did you take to be as fair as possible in reporting this book?

First and foremost, I tried to keep an open mind, which is easy to say and harder to do. I spent a lot of time talking to people who brought these lawsuits against the media, and the lawyers who are waging this really protracted campaign to make it easier to sue the media. I hope I come across as having treated their views fairly and really trying to understand them.

Another really important thing is that I spent a lot of time getting to know people who were harmed by what were arguably unfair things written about them. There are two examples that jump to mind. One is Carey Lohrenz, who is one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. military, whose career was destroyed by a report written by an advocacy group that really questioned her qualifications. Another example is Kathy McKee, who is an actress who said she was raped by Bill Cosby, and when she went public with the accusations, Cosby and his lawyer accused her of being a liar. Spending a bunch of time with Carey Lohrenz and Kathy McKee, and with the lawyers who are bringing cases like theirs, helped me understand a lot more the arguments that are being made.

How much do you think President Trump’s declaring the press “the enemy of the people” has played into the movement you describe in your book?

Tremendously. That was the equivalent of the starter’s pistol being fired. Not only in declaring the press the enemy of the people, but actively campaigning in 2016 on this notion that, if he became president, he would do what he could to open up the libel laws and make it easier for people like him to sue the media. He was tapping into this existing distrust that built up among many Americans. But there’s no question that his attacks on the media, and his pledges to make it easier to sue the media, shifted the conversation. I think that they inspired a lot of people all over the country — lawyers and activists and public figures — to embrace libel lawsuits as a weapon, not only to deal with situations where they’ve been wrongly accused of something or defamed, but when they were facing unfavorable news coverage.

You mention in the book that some of your subjects threatened to sue you. How did you make sure that Murder the Truth was as factually bulletproof as possible?

I checked my facts, repeatedly and frequently. We had lawyers review the book. Every person in the book who was a character, and certainly anyone who was accused in any way of doing or saying something untoward, was given ample time to respond or offer their thoughts. And you’ll see in the book, there are a lot of places where I’m offering multiple versions of the same event. I think I did a pretty good job of giving people the right to explain when they have a different recollection or a different interpretation of events. There are footnotes in the book where, in some cases, I’m pointing out that someone disagrees with the way I’m characterizing it, so readers can come to their own conclusion.

But there is no substitute for just interviewing people and then reinterviewing them, and then sending them a detailed list of fact checking questions. The people who my bias was most likely to make me averse to I was extra-solicitous with, trying to not only understand their perspective and fairly represent their perspective, but making sure I got the facts right about them and their careers and their cases.

Have you ever been sued for your reporting before?

Yes. It really sucks. I’ve been sued in the UK, where I worked for many years, when I was at the Wall Street Journal. I was sued for something I wrote in my first book, about a minor character, and I’d gotten some facts wrong about him. The case was settled out of court in 2022, five years after publication. I don’t know what the settlement terms entailed, other than that they did not include anything on my end, such as having to amend the book or pay money.

One of the messages I’m trying to bring to readers and to the public is that the media is imperfect. We get facts wrong. I get facts wrong. Sometimes we have our biases. Sometimes it can affect how hard or soft we are on different people or different subjects. I think the media could do a better job of owning up to its mistakes. We’re pretty good at owning up when we get a fact wrong, but we’re less good in general at owning up to when maybe a line of coverage has been a little bit off or we’ve come down too hard or too easy on a politician from one party or the other.

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One of the main subjects in your book is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in 2019 raised the prospect of overturning Sullivan. You didn’t get to speak with him for the book. If you could get him to answer one question on the record, what would it be?

My question would be, What changed between 1991 when, during his confirmation hearings, he endorsed Sullivan, and 2019, when he called for Sullivan to be overturned? What changed in his head in those intervening years? My leading theory is that in the time between those statements in the confirmation hearings, which was right before the Anita Hill [sexual harassment] allegations came to light, he underwent some really difficult media coverage and has repeatedly been the subject of news coverage that revealed things about him that he did not want revealed. That was probably — understandably — a very painful experience for him. I know from what he’s said in public that he came to really loathe the mainstream media. My theory is that that loathing that he holds for the media scrutiny he’s gotten has led him to change his mind on the meaning of the First Amendment.

Last month, the former casino magnate Steve Wynn asked the court to overturn Sullivan. The court hasn’t announced yet whether they’ll take on Wynn’s case. Do you have any predictions there?

My track record with making predictions is just awful. That being said, there’s obviously been this very aggressive push by people, including, most recently, Steve Wynn, to try to get the court to overturn Sullivan. There are two votes, at least — Thomas and [Neil] Gorsuch — but I’m not sure there are the four votes needed to actually accept a case, much less the five votes that would be needed to overturn Sullivan.

What I think is a more likely scenario in the short to medium term is that the court accepts and maybe agrees with a challenge to how the Sullivan precedent has been interpreted and expanded over the years in subsequent cases. I would not be surprised if the Supreme Court starts to chisel away at those definitions and maybe narrow the definition of who classifies as a public figure. If that were to happen, it has the potential to be really quite consequential. It would have a real chilling effect.

Does the prospect of Sullivan being overturned or weakened keep you up at night?

I have kids, so the things that keep me up at night are my children and stuff like that. But look, I’m sitting right now in the New York Times building. From the little cubby I’m sitting in, I’m looking at a ton of journalists who are working day in and day out to write about powerful people and institutions. We do our best every day to tell the truth and to bring the truth to light, and that’s just in this one building in midtown Manhattan. All over the country, journalists are endeavoring to bring things to light and share the truth with their readers, and that’s true for people on the right, it’s true for people on the left. It’s true for people in the center. It’s true for people at the New York Times or people with a Substack newsletter or a podcast or a blog. It affects everyone really.

I am worried that this long-running campaign to weaken Sullivan and to delegitimize the media is already having a really negative effect in some ways. For the book, I talked to journalists all over the country who were facing or have faced legal threats or lawsuits, which have, in some cases, pushed them over the edge and made it financially or even psychologically impossible to continue doing their jobs. We all lose when people, whether they’re journalists or not, feel like they don’t have the right or the ability to speak out.

To tell the truth: David Enrich on the right wing’s battle against the press

How did America get the far right so wrong?

Further reading from David Enrich

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