Money Talks: The Campaign Against the Free Press
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Hello, and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by New York Times Business Investigations Editor, David Henrich, who has a new book called Murder the Truth, Fear of the First Amendment, and a secret campaign to protect the powerful. David, first of all, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about your background. I am a journalist at the New York Times, as you said. I've been at the Times since 2017. I've been at the Times since 2017.

Prior to that, I was at the Wall Street Journal for many years, both as a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C. and New York and London. This is my fourth book. And what else do you want to know about me? Well, I want to know why you were compelled to write this book at this time, because it's coming out at a moment in our political environment and business environment, media environment, that seems...

incredibly timely in possibly the worst way. So what got you started on this project? Yeah, well, the timing is like a lucky or unlucky fluke, depending on your perspective, I guess. And I started working on this a few years ago, in large part because my colleagues and I at the times, it just seemed like every time we were starting something,

a big investigative project. We were getting besieged by threatening letters from lawyers representing rich and powerful people or institutions that we were writing about. And it,

It seemed like it was part of a very well-orchestrated campaign to intimidate us and deter us from tackling difficult or dicey topics. And I mean, it was a big pain in the butt for us to deal with that. And it's sometimes kind of disturbing to deal with it. But it got me thinking just for smaller news outlets or independent journalists, of which there are so many more right now.

just what it would be like for them. So I started doing a bunch of reporting, talking to smaller and independent places and just heard these horror stories about the legal threats they were facing. Sometimes those threats were kind of bleeding into the physical realm. Often it was leading journalists or publishers to either kind of water down or just stop doing investigations.

Or in other cases, they were sticking to their guns and continuing, but then facing really dramatic and catastrophic, in some cases, financial consequences just from being dragged into court, having to hire lawyers. Sometimes many places don't have libel insurance. Those that do were finding that they were ending up having to pay a ton more going forward after they'd been sued.

It occurred to me that this is really part of a deliberate campaign by some very powerful people all over the country and their lawyers to make it much harder to write critical things about them. And then I started realizing that some of the same lawyers and others who were making these threats and bringing these lawsuits were a lot of the same people who were trying to overturn this decades-old Supreme Court precedent.

New York Times versus Sullivan, which really protects the right of journalists and others to criticize and scrutinize the rich and powerful. And I looked around and hadn't seen someone give this the full book treatment. And I was hearing just these incredible stories from people on the ground about

what they were enduring, and in a lot of cases, the really high costs that was exacting, not just financially, but in terms of stories they couldn't write about, wrongdoing they couldn't expose. And with Trump, obviously, kind of hovering in the background, this is like 2022, 2023 period, that threat seemed even greater, just given the rhetoric that he has used and his allies have used and the tactics that they have used. I didn't realize, obviously, that he would

be the president again when the book came out or quite how far he and his allies would be taking things that it does feel kind of alarmingly well-timed right now.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about Times v. Sullivan, since the book is kind of built around that specific case? Why is it so significant? And what are the contours of it? Every time I do one of these interviews, I find myself going way too deep on this because it's a complicated and really kind of compelling story. So I'm going to try to give the Cliff Notes version. The bottom line is that the case was decided in 1964. It concerned a full-page ad that ran in the New York Times, paid for by supporters of Martin Luther King. It

That is basically a fundraising appeal. And it listed kind of this litany of human rights abuses that racist Southern officials have been perpetrating against civil rights protesters. And some of the facts in the ad were either wrong or exaggerated.

A Southern official, an Alabama official named L.B. Sullivan, sued the New York Times, even though he wasn't named in the ad. The ad had criticized the Montgomery Police Department, which he was in charge of. He sued the Times for defamation and won in court. And his victory prompted a whole tidal wave of other similar lawsuits happening.

brought by many other Southern officials against not just the Times, but other national media as well. And it was part of an explicit attempt to prevent the national press from covering the civil rights movement. And the Times appealed its defeat and

And eventually the case made it up to the Supreme Court in 1964. And the Supreme Court issued this unanimous landmark decision that would kind of revolutionize the way that journalists and others could write about rich and powerful people. And the decision basically said that if...

you as a journalist write about someone and get a fact wrong by mistake, you're okay. You cannot get sued or you cannot get successfully sued for defamation. The only way that a public official like L.B. Sullivan or like the president of the United States can win damages in a defamation suit is if they can prove that the person who did the writing or the publisher was

either knew that what they were writing was false or acted with reckless disregard as to its accuracy. And the result of this decision and a handful of cases that followed it was that it basically gave the media and everyone else kind of breathing room to engage in vigorous debate about

about issues of public importance. So whether that concerned the president or a local politician or a billionaire or even like a local real estate development company, a local journalist or even someone like on Yelp. Yelp didn't exist back then, obviously. But like anyone who wanted to have a voice in things could speak freely and including voice in critical opinions and critical facts could

as long as they were doing it basically in good faith. And this really revolutionized how the press was able to write about this kind of stuff. It's not a coincidence. This case was decided in 1964. And the media then went and started investigating things like Watergate and the Vietnam War. And it really changed the dynamics of the media. And so there was a much more kind of accountability-driven focus there.

And it was really the birth in many ways of investigative journalism. And the remarkable thing to me about Sullivan is that for the next many decades,

It was really treated with reverence by people on both sides of the political spectrum. There's just this really remarkable unanimity widespread among judges, activists, politicians, everyone, that this was a really important decision that had enabled everyone, regardless of their political opinion, regardless of whether they're a journalist or an activist or an academic or

or just a normal citizen, allowed them to really engage in one of our most cherished rights, which is the freedom of speech. And it's only very recently since the rise of Trump that that attitude has changed and that consensus has kind of begun to crumble.

Yeah. Also, just to underscore your point about bipartisan support for this, you know, I was struck by the pieces in your book where you talk about Jeff Sessions defending it. And really before he became part of the Trump administration, but, you know, one of the most right wing Alabama lawyers and public figures coming out and, you know, celebrating that the case was defended successfully. And now you have this sort of conservative backlash, maybe not conservative, but very right wing backlash against it that

That seems to be based in part on the idea that the actual malice standard gives journalists some kind of incentive to publish things that are incorrect. Yeah, and I think this is one of those areas where, look, I'm biased. I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist my whole career. I believe deeply in what we do as journalists. But there's been a lot of really bad faith attacks.

on Sullivan and on the role the media plays. And look, we get things wrong in the media. We have biases. We have blind spots. We get facts wrong sometimes. Sometimes we like harm people's reputations and we deserve scrutiny and we deserve criticism, whether it's from the right or the left about not covering things.

properly. The truth, though, is that for the most part, journalists operate with good intentions and in pursuit of trying to get things right and trying to understand the world as it is. And the right wing has really, since the rise of Trumpism, has taken normal kind of levels of media bashing, which has been a bipartisan tradition going back to America's founding. They've taken that to an entirely new level that's premised on this notion that journalists are deceitful,

ideological actors that are trying not to reveal the truth, but to kind of obscure the truth. And I think that this is something that is very much a product of Trumpism, but it's something that is not just existing at the national level or emanating from the white. This is something that has been trickling down through the MAGA movement down really to a very local level. And so the tactics that Trump has used to intimidate and threaten the press have become really the

the MO of people all over the country in a way that is, it is a really difficult climate for journalists to operate. And obviously right now at this particular moment, it's become even more fraught. I feel like part of the reason why this is happening is that people have these ideas about how journalism works, but also how the media business works.

And people really do, even people who are in theory supportive of 1A protections for journalists believe that, for example, we're all incentivized by clicks and provocative stories that attract attention just because they're provocative. How much do you think that really influences the rights ability to

create this narrative that journalists are bad actors. It seems like a compelling story to say we're all motivated by money in a business model that's corrupt. Again, I think this is a kind of a good faith versus bad faith discussion. And you and I are having a good faith discussion where we can honestly engage in this. I don't think that happens often.

in a lot of the conversations on the right wing. Again, there are many valid critiques of the media in general, the New York Times and myself included. And that's not really what's happening here. And this is, there is a broad campaign right now, we're seeing in the White House, to use lies and conspiracy theories and distortions to advance a really radical agenda. And it

They're trying to tar the entire media as dishonest and in some cases criminals because the media's job is to do its best to speak truthfully and to let readers know what is truly happening. And so that's a function in our society and in our democracy that is a real threat to people whose agenda is premised on truth.

spreading lies and deceiving people. And obviously, we all like stories that get the most clicks. And our business model is often revolves around either selling subscriptions or selling advertisements. So we're incentivized for sure to do stories that readers want to read and that will go viral or whatever. But in my experience, there have been very, very few cases where reporters as a result of those pressures and those business interests are deliberately getting facts wrong or skewing things. And

There are many, many, many more examples on the other side where the truth of what the media is doing or the truth about what the media is reporting on are getting warped and in some cases just completely just things are getting concocted out of thin air in an effort to discredit what we're doing. Not because people don't like any of the partisanship in the media or anything like that. It's because the truth is the enemy of people who are lying and distorting things and spreading conspiracy theories.

I think in the first Trump administration, there was a sense that Trump was lying about things like crowd sizes and stuff like that right at the beginning. And that was it was kind of like silly and seemed a little bit harmless. And what we're seeing in the first part of this administration is that it's much more coordinated. And the efforts to delegitimize and discredit the press are much more kind of systemic and much more well thought out.

and designed to protect secrets being revealed about what is driving the policy agenda and what impact that policy agenda is having. I find that even some of the arguments that we're motivated by the wrong things on a business basis disingenuous. I've been on the business side of publishing too. And the reality is advertisers don't want to run alongside provocative content. That's just not how any of this works.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. One of the telling moments for me, I spent a lot of time talking to local journalists for this book and hearing from them because, again, this is playing out at a national level right now, but it's also playing out at a very local level. And so there's a situation, for example, in Iowa that I wrote about involving a small local paper there where a reporter wrote a story about some wrongdoing by someone in the local police department.

And the result of that story, which was completely true, no one challenged any of the facts, and no one even questioned the basis, like whether it was a worthwhile story. It was 100% a worthwhile story that deserved to get public attention. And as a result, the police department started crying about fake news. And one of the things that happened is that this local newspaper lost a lot of its subscribers and its advertisers immediately.

And the revelation that the reporter and his editor had was that investigative journalism and accountability journalism is really important for the public interest, but it's bad business sense often. It alienates people. It scares people away. And so the notion that we're all pursuing ambitious investigative stories to hold powerful people to account in order to make money is wrong.

I think there's maybe some alignment between those business interests and the stories on a national level. But when you get down to a local level or even places that are not like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, it's the opposite is actually true. Well, one of your early horror stories in the book is very close to my heart or maybe my spleen because I've been a lot about it. You talk about the...

Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel's lawsuit against Gawker. For listeners who know me primarily as a host of Slate Money, I was the founding editor of Gawker in 2002. I left about a year later. So I wasn't around for the Hulk Hogan shenanigans and the lawsuit. But of course, I have friends and colleagues who were and who are in the middle of it.

But even more than that, after the lawsuit shook out and Gawker lost it, one of the things that affected me directly was every time I tried to hire investigative journalists, they would ask me an entirely new set of questions, one of which was, what kind of indemnification can the publication provide for me? Because Charles Harder, who was Hogan's lawyer, figured out a way to pull journalists out from under the indemnification umbrella that Gawker had.

And this is super important, of course, for organizations that report on powerful people because nobody goes into the journalism for the money. We're not exactly super well paid. We can't afford sometimes to report on powerful people, especially people who are billionaires or presidents or presidents.

are in a position to throw lawsuits at us or to threaten us without some kind of institutional protection. And after that lawsuit happened and Gawker lost it, I know a lot of investigative journalists who became very nervous about their vulnerabilities, even at larger institutions, but at smaller institutions, like you're talking about, the sort of local newsrooms,

smaller independent newsrooms, this is a real problem. It still is one. Yeah. And that's by design also, right? The point of that campaign against Gawker that Peter Thiel orchestrated was not only to win damages for Hulk Hogan and maybe drive Gawker out of business. It was to send a very clear message on behalf of himself, Peter Thiel, and also the kind of Silicon Valley in general, that they were not going to sit idly by and let journalists and

question their motives and attack or criticize or scrutinize what they were doing. And I think that part of the lesson of that Gawker litigation was that this is a game plan, a roadmap that other billionaires and other powerful people could use to threaten the existence of publications that didn't kind of adhere to the rules of the road that these billionaires wanted. And again, that's just completely antithetical to the way most people

Certainly most journalists view the point of the First Amendment. And I think one of the scary things is, I mean, Charles Harder, who obviously represented Hulk Hogan, then went on to represent the Trump family in a bunch of cases and became one of the leading proponents early on for getting rid of New York Times versus Sullivan, or at least weakening New York Times versus Sullivan, and has played an important role, I think, in building support for

for that campaign. And part of that from Harder's perspective, and he would probably disagree with this, but based on my reporting, what I've learned is that not only is that in Harder's financial self-interest, because it allows it, it makes it easier for him to file and perhaps win lawsuits, but it also is very conducive to his client's interests because the act of suing someone

It's not always about winning or losing in court. It's about sending a message that if you challenge us, we are going to take you to court and tie you up in litigation for possibly years. That is going to be distracting. It's going to be expensive and it's going to make it harder for you to get insurance in the future. And it's a message that I think resonated well.

in a very negative way with a lot of journalists, especially those who didn't have the privilege of working at places like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that have very deep-pocketed owners and have big in-house legal departments.

Yeah, and I think if you're starting a newsroom right now, it's almost sort of built into your idea of what the startup costs are going to be. I co-founded a newsroom in Texas several months ago called The Barbed Wire, and one of the first budgetary line items was insurance, which is very difficult to get as a fledgling newsroom. Did you get it ultimately? We have a sort of partial coverage right now that after a point, generally if you're starting a newsroom, it's difficult to be covered on day one.

But after you have a little bit of a track record of being public and publishing with no problems, then you become eligible to apply. So we're in that kind of gray area right now. It's good that you figured that out because a lot of places I've talked to are really struggling with that and unable to either afford or even find, some places even struggle to even find places that'll give them a quote for insurance. Yeah. And that's a scary place to be, especially right now when there's a whole army of lawyers out there

that have, I think, really, they're quite savvy and smart and they've figured out how to weaponize lawsuits, even ones that are just patently ridiculous and are going to get thrown out of court at some stage.

They figured out how to weaponize those to exact just the most painful toll. And it puts a lot of pressure. Like even it's easy to kind of roll your eyes and frown at someone for settling one of these suits or walking away and kind of caving in. But the reality is in some cases, publishers and journalists face a choice between caving and surviving. It's just a really unfortunate situation. And it is completely connected to a very deliberate campaign that I think started with Trump.

but has spread nationwide at this point. It's funny, while we're talking, I just got a Slack notification from the editor of The Barbed Wire. Just a reminder to everyone that our mandatory legal training is next week. We'll be taking a break here, but we'll be back with more with our guest, David Enrich.

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Another thing that I think about a lot, I'm constantly hearing, particularly Silicon Valley people, say that they think you can disintermediate journalism just by giving people a blog platform or something like that. And we've seen a lot of publicity around journalists who have gone and created their own newsletters at Substack or decided that they wanted to go solo.

And my thinking about that is just that it's going to be very difficult for those people to replace what you do institutionally solely for the legal reasons. I mean, if you're operating as an independent journalist and you just don't have that infrastructure, your biggest concern isn't even necessarily how am I going to monetize this so that I can make a living? It's what do I do if I say something someone powerful doesn't like and then they decide that they're going to financially ruin me as a result.

Yeah. And I mean, there's the huge financial cost of that. There's also a mental health component of this that I think I'm talking to a lot of journalists who have been in this situation. It's obviously a little bit amorphous and intangible at times, but it can be really grinding. And in some cases, I think that's what pushes some people over the edge more than the money is just that they can't bear this anymore. It's

super stressful. It's their life's work on the line. Sometimes it's their family home or they're in debt to have launched something. And I think that one of this journalism is like a bit of a mess right now, obviously. But to me, one of the real silver linings of our current situation is this proliferation of independent voices, newsletters, podcasters, things like that, which I think is

I don't think it's like a clean replacement for the quote unquote legacy media, but I think it's really additive and a great thing to have. But I think this weaponization of libel law and the threats that have become just par for the course, it poses a real existential threat to that business model. And I think it's something that people on both the left and the right need to be really concerned about because this is not something that

People on the left are fully capable of weaponizing the legal system against their ideological enemies too. And it has not been happening nearly as much in that direction, but there's nothing to stop it from happening if you get rid of some of these legal safeguards that people on the right wing are trying to do. If you don't work in media, it may not be obvious how much of a toll these intimidation campaigns take on people. Like when's the first time you got a legal threat from a subject or? Oh God, I don't know. Uh,

It's been a long time ago, but they've definitely increased in frequency. I think the first time I got one, I was 23 and writing Gawker, and I got a cease and desist from Marty Singer, who runs this giant celebrity entertainment law firm. And so much of his business consists of suing media outlets on behalf of celebrities. Yeah.

And I think in this case, all we had done was link to an unflattering story about Catherine Zeta-Jones. We had not even published it. We got a sort of nasty legal gram that thankfully we did have a lawyer and she instantly realized that it was frivolous. And so I think we wrote something back explaining how hyperlinked worked to, you know, the law firm. And then,

It sort of became an avalanche after that. Yeah. And I remember being slightly terrified by it, but there was something about being 23 where you don't quite understand the stakes and maybe you get ignored to it over time. And there's something like it's all fun and games at first. Like if you're 23 and you're getting threatened by Marty Singer, that's in some ways maybe like a badge of honor, right? You're cool. You matter. You're obviously attracting the attention of this big, powerful Hollywood lawyer, right?

And that's great until you actually get sued and need to hire a lawyer and deal with discovery requests and depositions and things like that. And I think that's part of what happened at Gawker, frankly, is that they had experiences with good lawyers and the power of the First Amendment, but had not gone up against someone in Peter Thiel who had unlimited financial resources at his disposal. And I think that for a long time, really up until the trial, Gawker was not taking this nearly seriously enough. And they learned to really pay attention

painful lesson. I think one of the silver linings of Gawker's demise is that it was a real wake-up call to everyone in the media that there are people like Peter Thiel out there and there are lawyers like Charles Harder out there who are acting with purpose. And this is not an accident and they're going to try and do it again.

Yeah, well, I've always designed to protect people from recklessness and malice from the media. But that's it's the Gawker situation was something that no media business would, I think, reasonably anticipate, because there's not a good legal defense for somebody with unlimited deep pockets, whose entire objective is to simply destroy the outlet.

Right. Because there's no principle behind that except revenge, I guess. No. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now with kind of the rise of these Trumpian legal tactics is that the warfare is kind of asymmetric, right? The act of making a threat or filing even a frivolous lawsuit ties someone up in litigation for a long period of time. And once you realize that you have this threat hanging over you, that maybe this will happen and it can influence even subtly or subconsciously how you

individual journalists or institutions write about someone if they have a reputation for being litigious. And I think that that chilling effect is really dangerous. And especially at a time and in a political climate like this, where it's really important to have people feeling like they have the right and the power to speak up and dig into and scrutinize the most powerful people in the world. Yeah.

In a different newsroom, I was the editor-in-chief of the New York Observer, and we did a cover story on an entertainment reporter named Nikki Fink, who was notorious for suing outlets whenever they published things that were just simply unflattering about her. And I walked behind one of the editors who was working on the story, and he was on the phone with her. And he got off the phone, and he said, Nikki's threatening to sue us if we call her litigious. And I just thought...

Did that make it into the story? It did. That's definitely the most amusing threat that I've ever gotten. I had some kind of shades of that in this reporting where I would call people up and say, look, I'm working on a book about legal threats against journalists.

and here's how this concerns you. And their response, not always, but often, was to threaten to sue me. And of course, those scattered examples of that made it into the book. But it's become just such a default response among people at both a national, international, and local level in this country right now. And I know it's convenient to tie everything back to Trump, but I think in this case, it really does

Trump has popularized these tactics. His rhetoric has helped them spread. And the rhetoric that he right now that he and people like Elon Musk and Kash Patel and others are using in his inner circle is ridiculous.

not only kind of threatening on its face, but is designed, I think, to encourage their supporters to rise up and use and embrace similar tactics. And I just think it's a real threat. I think it was a threat to the mainstream media, but as much to people, kind of independent journalists. And another interesting thing about this, by the way, is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had made a big push in this space to try and crack down on the media and making it easier for public figures to sue the media. And

And the interesting thing is that what got in his way and ultimately derailed that effort was that conservative radio hosts in Florida started calling his office and saying, if you do this, we are the ones who are going to get sued and it's going to drive us out of business. And that to me was kind of a glimmer of hope that there's still a possibility of people on the right and the left finding some common ground on this topic because, you

When you start kind of censoring or enabling censorship of one political perspective or one voice, you start enabling it for everyone. And I think that's a really dangerous road to go down. Yeah. I mean, one of the firms you cover in your book, Claire Locke, you write about extensively is mostly being on the side that opposes Times v. Sullivan continuing to exist. But then toward the end, you note that Dominion is one of their clients. And that was a really successful defamation suit. Do you think that people on the right

look at that and it gives them pause generally? Or do you think that the narrative that Trump and Patel and all of his cohort are pushing that media is fundamentally dishonest outweighs those incentives that right-wing media companies have to not push back? I think that's a really good question. And I'm not quite sure where that lands. And the place where it matters the most is frankly on the Supreme Court, because they're going to be the ones who are asked or already being asked to reconsider Sullivan or reconsider some of the cases that followed Sullivan. And I think that's a really good question.

And I think it's kind of an open question where that stands right now. And I think there's a real tug of war between, on the one hand, realizing that

I mean, look, the interesting thing about the Dominion case, Fox News essentially lost that case, had to pay 700 plus million dollars in damages. And to me, if anything, that shows that the current legal framework we have for libel cases works pretty well. Right. They had Dominion to win that case was going to have to prove that Fox either knew they were lying or acted with reckless disregard.

And that threshold was pretty clearly met. There have been a bunch of other defamation cases recently, coincidentally or not, brought against people on the right, like Rudy Giuliani, where that threshold has been cleared. So I think you can make a really strong argument that there is no need

to overturn Sullivan or narrow Sullivan. And you can still have plenty of people getting sued for defamation when they defame someone. I think the question is really where the Supreme Court comes down on this. And you've got two justices, Thomas and Gorsuch, who have made clear that they are interested in reversing Sullivan. You've got a couple of justices who presumably don't want to. And then you've got a couple in the middle where it's anyone's guess, I think. And I think the most likely case is that there will be

some case in the future, in the near future, where the Supreme Court considers maybe narrowing the group of people that have to satisfy these higher standards to win a lawsuit. So, you know, right now it's a pretty broad range of public figures and public officials. And maybe you narrow that a little bit so that it's easier for people who are not government officials to bring lawsuits. And I can go down that path if you want. But it's like,

That could be very detrimental to the way journalists and others write about big businesses, rich businesses.

corporate executives, oligarchs, things like that. Yeah, I think a lot about how political will around this issue is shaped in part by how much people do or don't understand about media. And just to use the example we're talking about, defamation law. Some of the frivolous lawsuit threats that I've gotten are coming from just regular people who find themselves in the public spotlight, and they don't actually understand what defamation is. And they think it's anything that's unflattering to me

or potentially damaging to me. And so I've always sort of, I put the lawsuit threats from people who know what they're doing in one box and then the sort of frivolous from people who probably in their own minds, you know, mean well and feel like they've been done some injustice, but they don't actually understand the standards properly.

But I don't think most people understand that. So I worry sometimes that we have a culture of civic literacy that really heavily is media literacy. And so it's easier for the public to buy into the idea that maybe Sullivan offers journalists too many protections and that maybe it should be narrowed. I think what you said is right, but I think there's another component to it, which is that the media in general, I think,

the mainstream media has been way too kind of reflexively defensive about some of the things we've done over the years. And I think, I mean, just speaking for myself, I can think of things that I've gotten wrong, not like facts I've gotten wrong necessarily, although I have done that as well, but just kind of more broadly, like I wish I'd covered that differently or I wish I'd given more emphasis or less emphasis to that. Or I wish I hadn't,

Like in hindsight, like that angle I was pursuing was really informed by like a bias that I had or a bias that my colleague had or something like that. And I think we kind of pride ourselves on being truth tellers. And I think that maybe too often when we make mistakes, which is inevitable because we're humans, we're not fully transparent about how we made those mistakes. And so there's this kind of arrogance that I think has spread.

permeated parts of the media industry over the years, which is really, I think it's one of the factors that's eroded a lot of public trust in us. And it makes normal people sometimes think, why are journalists getting extra special legal protections that you and I don't have? And of course, that's a complete misreading of it because there is no special protection for journalists. But I think the media in general and the mainstream media and legacy places like the New York Times have not done nearly enough to be truly transparent and honest and

introspective about the way that we have kind of fallen down on the job at times. And we get very defensive also when we are criticized from the outside. And I think that's something we could really do a much better job at and it wouldn't completely solve the trust problem and certainly wouldn't do it overnight. But I think it would help if we could occasionally own up to mistakes that aren't just simply matters of fact.

So if you were starting a new newsroom, say in Texas, asking for a friend, how would you think about going into this environment and thinking about how to protect the enterprise of journalism and also insulate the newsroom from the kind of bad faith attacks that we're talking about? Man, I don't know. Like I'm in just like a weird seat where it's like very hard for me to put myself in those shoes because I work at the New York Times and I used to work at the Wall Street Journal. And those are places that are like,

really big and have their own kind of power and money behind them. And, and,

It makes things a lot easier, frankly. Maybe a little bit less fun at times, but certainly safer. I mean, I just think, first of all, having the wisdom and experience to know, I mean, as you said earlier, the difference between people who are just pissed off, they don't like being written about versus people who actually have a valid legal claim, I think is an important thing to know. But I think having the guts to admit when you're wrong and apologize when you're wrong if you've harmed someone is really important. But I think more than that, it's just a willingness and a desire to stand up

for what you believe is right and not let yourself be intimidated, which again is super easy for me to say sitting in the New York Times building right now because I don't have to deal with the consequences of that decision and that may be driving me out of business. So I mean, I think one other kind of bigger thing is that I think people, whether they're journalists or not,

There are laws in most states, I think about 35 states right now, that make it much harder, above and beyond the New York Times versus Sullivan decision, make it much harder for people to file frivolous defamation lawsuits. And these are called anti-slap laws. And they basically make it much easier for people to get frivolous cases dismissed. And they also impose laws.

deterrence in that if you face one of these frivolous lawsuits, you can seek to recover your legal fees from the person who filed it. And again, most states have some version of that law. The

The people who are pushing them in the states that don't have them are it's a really interesting mix of people on the right and on the left. This is something where there's been a lot of like bipartisan unanimity, even since the rise of Trump. And the fact that there are still moments of bipartisanship, I think, suggests that there is a lot of support for protecting people's rights to speak what they think is the truth.

Part of the reason I wrote this book, and I'm hoping lots of people read this book, is that I just think it's important for people to understand on the right and the left that this is not something that the mainstream media concocted all of a sudden. This is a longstanding American tradition that's had a lot of very broad support across the political spectrum for a really long time. And it

And it benefits not just reporters and publications, but also anyone who wants to say something negative in like a Yelp review or on a message board or on social media. It's a really important protection that allows people to speak their mind and criticize people in institutions that have more power than they do.

And that's it for Money Talks. Thank you to our wonderful guest, David Enrich, for joining. And thanks to Jessamyn Molley of Seaplane Armada for producing. We'll be back on Saturday with our regular edition of Slate Money. I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends?

Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories. About campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is: Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time?

What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president? The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.