Murder the Truth

Two quick things: New York Magazine’s The Cut published this Q+A with me for their “How I Get It Done” column and you should read it! And as always, The Handbasket is subscriber-funded, so if you want to support independent media during these dark times for democracy, become a paid subscriber today.

The title of David Enrich's new book Murder the Truth couldn’t be more apt as we watch the Trump administration crack down on speech across this country’s government institutions, college campuses and newsrooms. But when Enrich, a New York Times investigative journalist, set out to write it, he had no clue the environment into which it would be born. 

Despite the Supreme Court’s shocking decision this week not to hear Trump ally Steve Wynn’s challenge to New York Times vs. Sullivan—the landmark 1964 case that set the precedent for protecting the press, and the foundation for Enrich’s book—the threats to press freedom via the weaponization of the law looms large. Particularly against smaller, more vulnerable outlets. 

Enrich’s book explores the way Sullivan established modern press freedom, but also began the fomenting of grievances against journalists that would explode in the 21st century. He looks at it through the lens of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ lifelong push-pull with the press, the Hulk Hogan sex tape case that allowed billionaire Peter Thiel to ultimately destroy Gawker, and a cadre of conservative lawyers who’ve spent their careers insulating the powerful from criticism. 

I spoke to Enrich by phone late last week while each of us sat in our natural habitats: he in the New York Times building in Manhattan, and me outside at my local coffee shop. What started as a conversation about his great book turned into one about the tension between independent and traditional journalism, the public perception of the Times, and the real and present threats to press freedom. “In an ideal democratic situation, journalists would not have to worry that revealing the truth would put them in legal jeopardy,” he said.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: The case of New York Times vs. Sullivan could kind of be called the inciting incident for the modern weaponization of libel laws against journalists. Was there an inciting incident or case that made you want to write a book about it?

DAVID ENRICH, AUTHOR OF MURDER THE TRUTH: There wasn't a particular incident or case that got me interested in this. It was more just the accumulation of things that I was seeing firsthand. The New York Times does a lot of good investigative journalism, and we get a lot of angry and threatening letters. I run a small team of four or five reporters and we were just getting inundated. That's not a concern on its face to us because we have great in-house lawyers and we're owned by a family that has plenty of money, relatively speaking. But it really got me thinking about what this would be like if I worked at a smaller outlet or if I was on my own as an independent journalist—and my theory was that receiving threatening letters from powerful people would be a lot scarier and that it might start to influence how I did journalism, the targets I picked and how I wrote about them. 

And so I just started calling around to a lot of local journalists, independent journalists, news outlets and media lawyers all over the country and just asking them what they were seeing. And what they were seeing confirmed my theory, which was that these tactics are proliferating, and they're having, in some cases, a really severe impact on the ability and appetite of journalists to do their jobs properly.

KABAS: There's sort of this paradox of people with less legal protections and a lower profiles going after bigger targets. Targets that perhaps aren't being pursued by larger outlets. What do you think accounts for that?

ENRICH: I think that there can be a tendency when you work at a major outlet and you've been doing this for years and years, you become a little bit of an institutionalist. You've been covering the same thing for a long time. Nothing is new, or nothing is as fresh. Nothing is as outrageous. I got my start doing independent journalism too, and it was always surprising to me seeing other outlets and journalists with more experience than me covering things in a kind of boring way. 

So I think part of what's happening is that you have a new generation—I don't know how old you are—but like there's a new generation of journalists who are operating outside of the mainstream. They play by their own rules, and they produce stories in different ways, right? Like, the way I came across you was not because you've written a story that appeared on the front page of something. It was because you were getting, essentially in real time, information from people like who had very important stuff to share and it seemed to me you were sharing it with very little filtering to your audience, providing great transparency at a moment of great urgency. That's super valuable, but that's also not the way the New York Times would operate, for better and for worse, right?

KABAS: I'm 37 and I went to traditional journalism school at George Washington University and all my professors were old newspaper guys, and that inspired me to go in the complete opposite direction. I saw them as representatives of something that was bygone. And then as the industry was crumbling and everyone's getting laid off, in my mind I was like I need to go with my gut and keep doing something completely different. So it wasn't so much that I came up in a new generation, it's that it was almost out of necessity just to try something new.

ENRICH: It's funny, I did not go to journalism school, so I had no real journalism training until I got out of college, and I toyed with being independent. I went the more institutional route. I love where I work and I love my job, and I'm proud of the work that my colleagues and I do, but there are definitely many days where I'm like, man, what would have happened if I had just followed my gut and gone the independent route?

There is a hugely important role for independent journalists to play: having more voices in a democracy, having traditional news outlets and mainstream media journalists challenged by people who just have a different playbook and who are going to view things differently, that is healthy and constructive. It keeps everyone on their toes. 

KABAS: It's funny, I'm very surprised by your attitude towards independent journalists—not because of anything you've said or done personally, but I just feel like there's this kind of, I don't wanna say animosity between traditional media and independent journalists, but just sort of like not being able to understand how we can coexist in the same ecosystem. Even, for example, the big story that I broke about the OMB funding—The Times wrote about it shortly after I published and they didn't cite my work at all.

ENRICH: Yeah, that must be really frustrating. I would be very frustrated if I were you in that situation.

KABAS: I was frustrated. I was furious. And I decided to reach out to the reporter as politely as possible to point this out. To his credit, he did update it and add a reference to my work (even though he didn't credit me with breaking it.) So I just feel like there’s a little, I don’t know, shadiness between what you do and what I do? So I'm wondering how you think we make that better.

ENRICH: I don't know how to make everything right in the world, but I think one of the things that a lot of journalists at the New York Times and elsewhere have seen is the role that new outlets and new voices are playing breaking news and bringing very important stuff to life in the past crazy two months. 

There are a lot of changes going on in journalism right now. We should be communicating with people in their native languages and their native lexicons, and I part of the reason people like you have been so successful is obviously you're a very intrepid and dogged reporter getting very valuable first hand primary source information, but you're also coming to people on a platform and in different mediums where they are native, and where they exist, and where you also are native and where you exist. So you're speaking a language they understand. It's clear, it's direct, it's transparent, and it's really valuable. And sometimes when that gets filtered through the mainstream media, it can become less clear because we have conventions and styles, and we're writing for different audiences. It's not always better.

KABAS: Maybe it’s also a matter of how we view our audiences. Because I use a subscriber model, everything is so personal to me. What my readers think and how they respond to things matters so much. Whereas I think sometimes the attitude more traditional outlets have towards their audience is like, we're just gonna keep doing our work and the haters can hate. I wonder if you think that makes a difference.

ENRICH: I completely see what you're saying, and I don't entirely disagree, but I also do not entirely agree. At the Times we have readers of many different ages, political persuasions, interests, and I think our real challenge is finding new ways to connect with them and build trust in a way that we have historically overlooked.

One example is the comment sections of stories are becoming more and more prominent. We're increasingly being encouraged as journalists to be in the comments responding to people, engaging with them. That might seem blindingly obvious to someone like you, but it’s a bit of a sea change for some people at a place like the Times. A lot of people here came of age in journalism at a time when most people were kind of passive receivers of information, and the New York Times was the authoritative voice. And that can breed a certain amount of complacency.

The world is changing, but I think a lot of the leadership of the New York Times and a lot of the journalists of the New York Times are really very receptive to that change. But I mean, it's really complicated. And I think one of the advantages that smaller outlets and independent journalists have is you can be a lot more nimble and have normal interactions with other humans, which comes across as very stilted and forced when we try to do it through an institutional framework. But again, it's not for lack of trying, and I think people like me and my colleagues who work at big media companies have a lot to learn.

KABAS: I think one place you're really seeing this divergence is coverage of trans issues—the way that trans people have been targeted by not just the administration, but long before this. And there's been a lot of criticism of how the Times has dealt with it. What do you think of how it's been handled, and how do you think it could be better?

ENRICH: That's a totally valid and good question and I'm not super qualified to answer. The one thing I feel very comfortable talking about is that I know a lot of my colleagues who have been engaged in this coverage. I know them personally and I have worked with a lot of them —not on coverage of trans issues but in other contexts— and they operate in good faith, and they do their best. They work so hard to cover this as well as they can. I am a straight, white, affluent, middle-aged, cisgendered man, so I cannot begin to appreciate and I do not begin to appreciate the complexity and sensitivity of this. But what I do know from firsthand experience is how hard my colleagues work to get this right, and that does not mean that they always do.

The New York Times in general makes mistakes all the time. Mainstream media makes mistakes all the time. I think in general—I'm not speaking about trans issues here—we're very good at correcting our mistakes when we get facts wrong or we misspell someone's name or something like that. We're a lot less good when we get a line of coverage a little bit wrong, or when our own biases lead us to come down too hard on someone, or too soft on someone. I think we can do a much better job and I think it's really incumbent upon us to think about ways to do this—but when that happens, being transparent and accountable and not defensive and trying to really grapple with that in an honest way. 

KABAS: Getting back to the book, I noticed the way you wrote it seemed almost hyper-aware of opening yourself up to legal challenges, which is what the entire book is about. Was that an albatross throughout the writing process?

ENRICH: So in other words, am I worried about getting sued myself, and is that reflected a little bit?

KABAS: And did that hang over your head throughout?

ENRICH: I wouldn't say it hung over my head, but I mean, this is the second book I've written that is largely about lawyers doing what I perceive as not great things, and lawyers tend to be litigious. I was receiving legal threats as I wrote this book from numerous people at numerous times, so yeah, I was definitely being careful. Someone's comment denying or disputing something, I'm incorporating that into the writing in the main body of the story. But other times what they're saying is just too out of step with what I believe to be the truth that I've relegated it to a footnote. The idea in my head, at least, was that the main narrative is what I believe to be the truth. And there's some cases where I need to give someone their voice and let them say what they want to say, because it's important for people to be able to reach their own conclusion. 

And also, I don't want to get sued. I do not want to get sued. I've been sued. It sucks.

KABAS: Yeah, I've been threatened. It sucks.

ENRICH: I've been sued and threatened, and I work for the New York Times, and I worked at the Wall Street Journal when some of this happened as well, and I had the institutional backing of multinational companies with big teams of lawyers and very deep pockets and a lot of experience. And so that is scary and unpleasant for me. And that's kind of what I try to keep coming back to both in the book: that this is not a story about the New York Times getting censored, or The Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal getting censored. This is a story about people with less power getting censored: That can mean journalists from smaller outlets or independent journalists, but it also means community activists, people who might want to circulate a petition in their town. And Supreme Court precedents that are now under attack protect all of those voices.

KABAS: Before he became FBI director, Kash Patel told Steve Bannon in 2023 that he would “come after” journalists for their coverage of the 2020 election, and would figure out what the punishment should be. Do you feel like the government is closer to figuring out what punishment of journalists will look like?

ENRICH: Well, it's a little hard for me to separate the rhetoric from the reality here. Musk has made no secret that he wants journalists in jail. He and people like Rick Grenell have called journalists traitors, and we know what the punishment for treason can be. Patel was seemingly fantasizing with Bannon about using the FBI's power to come after journalists. I will not be surprised if and when he does that, but to my knowledge, he has not yet done it. But it's on the mind of basically any journalist who reports in the national security space, for example, and I think it's something that if that were to start happening is a really serious concern for anyone who cares about the First Amendment.

KABAS: Yeah, I think about it all the time.

ENRICH: The prospect of journalists or whistleblowers facing really serious legal repercussions seems a lot more plausible now than at any time in my lifetime. I don't think I'm personally in any danger, but it's very scary from a lot of my colleagues at the Times, and just in the broader journalism community. In an ideal democratic situation, journalists would not have to worry that revealing the truth would put them in legal jeopardy.

KABAS: That's how the truth gets murdered, right?

ENRICH: Exactly.