Updated April 09, 2025 at 11:56 AM ET
The right to free speech is almost synonymous with the right to a free press for some Americans, but not always.
In recent years, President Trump has called for nearly every major American TV news network to be punished in reaction to interview questions or coverage he dislikes.
"Because they are crooked. They're dishonest. And frankly they should have their licenses…taken away," Trump said to a crowd in New Hampshire during his 2024 campaign.
He's also filed lawsuits against CBS and The New York Times and banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool for not following his order to rename the Gulf of Mexico. A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to restore the AP's access to cover presidential events. The government has a week to respond or appeal the order.
But the president isn't the only one seeking to use the courts to punish unflattering news coverage. New York Times deputy investigations editor David Enrich told Morning Edition that local officials and business moguls are also turning to lawsuits or the threat of them with varying degrees of success to silence the press.
Enrich, author of Murder The Truth, Fear, the First Amendment and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, spoke to NPR's Michel Martin as part of our ongoing series about how free speech is changing under President Trump.
The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
Michel Martin: Tell us about the case of The New York Times v. Sullivan that's at the heart of the book.
David Enrich: This is a case that the Supreme Court decided in 1964. The idea was that if you want to have a free press and if you want to have free speech, it's really important to make sure that people are not afraid, that if they screw up a fact or make an honest mistake when they're writing or speaking about someone powerful, that they're going to subject themselves to limitless liability. The Supreme Court created a standard called the actual malice standard, which essentially means that if you are a public official or a public figure, in order to win a lawsuit, you need to not only prove that someone defamed you, so injured your reputation with falsehoods, but also that they did it either knowing that the facts were wrong so lying, or basically acted with reckless disregard for the truth. This was a very high bar that the Supreme Court created, but it did that deliberately to give this breathing room for people to make sure that they could speak freely and criticize freely powerful people in the country or in their communities.
Martin: In recent decades, there has been a rise of a conservative media, a sort of ecosystem which amplifies the views of the conservative movement. They also position themselves in opposition to other legacy media organizations and portray themselves as being more fair, more accurate, etc., so that's not a secret. Your book talks about a secret campaign to protect the powerful. What is that?
Enrich: Well, there's been a legal movement underway in this country now for 10 or 15 years that has really only recently kind of burst into public view. The goal of that movement has been to really curtail the protections that journalists and members of the public have when it comes to speaking out or speaking about powerful people in their communities or the country. And it has been increasingly effective at making the argument that the media no longer deserves the First Amendment protections that it has long had. The argument is predicated on this idea that it has become impossible for normal people, when their reputations are damaged by the media to seek recourse through the courts. And of course, that is a sympathetic argument. It's not true, though, and there have been many examples recently of powerful public figures in public institutions managing to clear the high bar that the Sullivan case set and still win in court. And one of the things I saw through my reporting for this book was that all over the country, there have been hundreds of examples in recent years where powerful people, whether it is a mayor or a police chief or a local business owner all the way up to the president of the United States are using either threats of legal action or lawsuits to muzzle people or at least intimidate them and the fact is, even when those cases get thrown out of court, it basically leads people to self-censor.
Tune in to NPR and visit NPR.org every day this week for in-depth stories on "The State of the First Amendment: The Right From Which All Other Rights Flow."
Martin: Give an example from the book of a smaller news outlet, for example, being sued over its reporting.
Enrich: Yeah. And it doesn't even take an actual lawsuit for this to work and one of my favorite examples in the book involves a newspaper in Colorado that had a reporter who was writing about a local real estate development and there were some environmental and safety concerns about the real estate development. The local real estate development company hired some very powerful local lawyers to represent them, and they then proceeded to send a bunch of threatening letters to the journalist and his bosses and the publisher. And very quickly, the newspapers started getting cold feet and stories were either watered down or spiked. And the newspaper stopped covering it, at least in a negative way, this real estate development.
Martin: What I hear you saying is that these tactics aren't being used to achieve redress when something is wrong, you're saying they're being used to curtail reporting when the facts are actually right?
Enrich: Yeah, that's exactly right. There's just a huge power imbalance in a lot of these situations where a local business or a wealthy individual who has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited resources to just drag this out through the court system, send a million threatening letters and grind someone down through the legal process. And it comes at a time when most news organizations and most journalists are operating kind of on a financial knife's edge. And lawyers and law firms recognize that the simplest, safest thing for most journalists to do is often to back down.
Martin: One of the things that's been really interesting about the current environment is that there are a number of news organizations that have settled lawsuits that a lot of First Amendment observers thought they could win. What has changed that it makes sense for these news organizations, if indeed it does, for them to settle these cases when people say you could win those?
Enrich: Well, I think one of the things that's changed just in the past few months is that we have a president who has shown himself very willing to use the powers of the presidency and the federal government to pursue vengeance against his enemies and so the one that settled was ABC News, which had been sued for defamation because its anchor George Stephanopoulos got some facts wrong in a segment about Donald Trump. And as you said, most First Amendment experts thought that if that went to trial, ABC would prevail. Instead, they settled by agreeing to pay $16 million to Trump and his presidential library.
The rationale is that big businesses are afraid that, if they don't make peace with the president, the president is going to do things that really severely damage their businesses and that's not an argument necessarily in favor of capitulating. But this isn't just about kind of the law in the Constitution at this point. And this is also about trying to understand the possibility that Trump might try to seek extra legal retribution.
Obed Manuel edited this digital story.
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