Murder The Truth

How do you protect a free press when law itself becomes a weapon? In Murder the Truth, the author argues that America’s information ecosystem faces a coordinated, well-funded campaign to weaken the First Amendment protections that enable adversarial journalism—chiefly New York Times v. Sullivan’s “actual malice” standard—and to replace them with a litigation-first regime that scares reporters silent. The project isn’t merely legal nitpicking. It blends judicial signals, political rhetoric, billionaire bankrolls, aggressive law firms, and transnational venue-shopping to raise the price of speaking truth to power.

Sullivan once insulated civil-rights reporting from retaliatory libel suits by requiring public officials (and later, many public figures) to prove a publisher knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded truth. The book shows how determined actors now portray that standard as runaway immunity, not democratic necessity. You watch a multipronged playbook unfold: judges invite “reconsideration,” think tanks package talking points, lawyers engineer test cases, funders back long wars, and politicians turn “fake news” into policy fuel.

The coordinated legal campaign

On the bench, Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in McKee (2019) and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent from denial in Berisha v. Lawson offer doctrinal openings to revisit Sullivan. Judge Larry Silberman’s fiery dissent in Tah v. Global Witness goes further, branding the press a “one‑party” system and urging Sullivan’s demise. Outside the courts, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the Claremont Institute amplify these signals. They host panels, circulate white papers (e.g., by Carson Holloway and David Logan), and encourage state-level bills (like Florida proposals floated under Governor Ron DeSantis) that could provoke conflicts primed for Supreme Court review.

Litigation entrepreneurs and funders

You meet a cadre of lawyers—Charles Harder, Libby Locke, Tom Clare—who turned defamation into a growth business. Their method is not just winning in court; it’s imposing costs through demand letters, punishing discovery, and targeted forum choice. Peter Thiel’s stealth financing of Hulk Hogan’s case against Gawker shows how a single billionaire can bankrupt an outlet via proxy. Internationally, oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska and figures like Walter Soriano deploy elite counsel and foreign fora to suppress reporting (note: these suits often dovetail with PR offensives, extending the chilling effect far beyond the courtroom).

Rhetoric, culture, and copycat pressure

Donald Trump’s “enemy of the people” line and his promise to “open up” libel laws transformed scorn for the press into a political norm. That shift emboldened public figures—Don Blankenship, Joe Arpaio, and others—to file or threaten suits that often fail on the merits but succeed in burdening targets. The cultural delegitimization feeds the legal project; when the public doubts the press’s legitimacy, it grows easier to sell reforms that curtail its protections.

Local news as the first casualty

The book’s most wrenching scenes come from small newsrooms absorbing six-figure legal hits and advertiser flight. The Carroll Times Herald’s investigation into a local officer invited a libel suit that, even when dismissed under Sullivan, left the paper financially hobbled. The Colorado Springs Gazette’s Gold Hill Mesa coverage drew legal threats that stalled public-safety reporting. In Wisconsin, the Wausau Pilot & Review faced a costly suit and struggled to obtain libel insurance (an underappreciated pressure point). The lesson is blunt: erode Sullivan and you don’t just tweak doctrine; you gut the watchdogs closest to home.

Counter-moves and their limits

Lawmakers have pushed back on foreign venue-shopping with Rachel’s Law in New York and the federal SPEECH Act, which blocks enforcement of overseas libel judgments lacking First Amendment equivalents. Yet plaintiffs adapt, pivoting to privacy, data-protection, or malicious-falsehood claims in UK courts (the Soriano litigation against Forensic News is emblematic). Inside the U.S., uneven anti-SLAPP laws leave many outlets exposed to drawn-out suits with little chance of fee recovery, a feature—not a bug—for intimidation campaigns.

An unexpected twist: using libel to fight lies

The story isn’t one-note. The same system can hold purveyors of disinformation to account. Dominion Voting Systems’ suits—run by Clare Locke and Susman Godfrey—exposed internal Fox messages and “Brainroom” memos labeling election-fraud claims “100% false,” culminating in a $787.5 million settlement. Public-interest groups like Protect Democracy see targeted defamation litigation as a way to document, deter, and sanction mass falsehoods (compare: the Sandy Hook families’ wins against Alex Jones). The irony is intentional: current doctrine can reach egregious lies without demolishing Sullivan’s core.

(Note: The book situates this campaign alongside other coordinated constitutional projects—like those reshaping abortion or administrative law—but underscores a distinctive ingredient here: secrecy and money flows that let a few actors shift the press’s risk calculus at scale.)

Key Idea

To “murder the truth,” you don’t need censorship; you need costs—procedural, financial, reputational—high enough that watchdogs decline to bark.

You can’t grasp the stakes without understanding New York Times v. Sullivan. Decided in 1964 amid the civil-rights struggle, Sullivan imposed the “actual malice” standard: public officials (and, later, public figures) must prove a publisher knew a statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for truth. That bar protected civil-rights coverage from hostile Southern courts (L. B. Sullivan’s suit was the catalyst) and later empowered high-stakes investigations—think Watergate—by reducing the threat of ruinous verdicts for honest mistakes.

The new critique and its messengers

A conservative legal network now argues that Sullivan over-protects careless media. Justice Clarence Thomas, once a defender of vigorous press freedoms (as reflected in his 1991 confirmation remarks), urged reexamination in McKee (2019). Justice Neil Gorsuch declared in Berisha v. Lawson that Sullivan had become “a kind of immunity,” relying heavily on David Logan’s article about diminished incentives to verify. Judge Larry Silberman’s dissent in Tah v. Global Witness blasted the “one‑party” media and called to overturn Sullivan outright.

From dissents to strategy

Dissents are not law, but they are invitations. Lawyers and funders pounced. Roy Katriel used Berisha as a vehicle to surface “actual malice” for Supreme Court review. Palin v. New York Times, brought by attorneys including Libby Locke, pressed the same critique from the trial-court trenches. Think tanks—the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and Claremont—organized events and circulated scholarship (Carson Holloway, David Logan) to build intellectual scaffolding. In Florida, DeSantis-world proposals floated edits to defamation law to tee up conflicts for federal review.

What narrowing Sullivan would do

If the Court loosens the standard—say, by redefining “reckless disregard” or shrinking who counts as a public figure—powerful plaintiffs gain an easier path to trial and verdict. Discovery costs soar, insurers panic, and small outlets retreat. This isn’t hypothetical: without Sullivan, the Carroll Times Herald suit over reporting on a local officer likely would have survived early dismissal, dragging a family paper into years of litigation it could not afford.

The data debate and credibility gaps

Justice Gorsuch’s reliance on Logan’s quantitative claims shows how scholarship can tilt doctrine. But Media Law Resource Center’s Michael Norwick flagged serious errors—the “one-in-ten” survival statistic was closer to “one-in-three.” The Court quietly corrected the figure online, yet the damage was done: the narrative that Sullivan breeds “ignorance is bliss” journalism had already circulated. You learn a meta-lesson: empirical claims that flatter a movement’s goals spread faster than corrections.

Historical amnesia versus originalism

Originalist critiques suggest Sullivan lacks textual or historical footing. Defenders counter with lived history: segregationist-era libel suits routinely muzzled civil-rights reporting; Sullivan was a remedy to structural abuse, not judicial vanity. The book frames this as a clash between tidy theory and messy reality: the First Amendment’s promise fails if judges ignore how power uses courts to punish dissent.

Key Idea

Dissents can be destiny when networks stand ready to turn rhetoric into cases, cases into conflicts, and conflicts into doctrine.

(Compare: coordinated constitutional projects around abortion and administrative law followed the same arc—seed dissents, build scholarship, pass test laws, and wait for the right Court.)

Part of the system’s transformation comes from lawyers who turned defamation into a business model. You meet Charles Harder, Libby Locke, Tom Clare, and firms that sell a product: intimidation-as-a-service. Their pitch to wealthy clients is simple: aggressive pre-publication pressure, maximalist lawsuits, punishing discovery, and PR campaigns that flip the narrative from scrutiny to victimhood. Even when these suits fail, they buy time, sap budgets, and discourage the next story.

The Harder-Thiel-Gawker template

Charles Harder’s representation of Hulk Hogan—secretly bankrolled by billionaire Peter Thiel—produced a $140+ million verdict and Gawker’s bankruptcy. The funding was hidden through proxies like Aron D’Souza. That secrecy mattered: Gawker couldn’t gauge settlement posture or wage a counternarrative about retaliation. The campaign’s success sent a public message: with enough money, you can dismantle a media company through the courts (note: Thiel framed it as morality; the effect was a blueprint for revenge-by-litigation).

Clare Locke’s dual-use example

Libby Locke and Tom Clare appear throughout, sometimes for powerful figures, sometimes for accountability projects. They won a verdict for University of Virginia’s Nicole Eramo against Rolling Stone’s infamous campus-rape story, arguing the magazine acted with actual malice. Later, the same firm helped lead Dominion’s defamation case against Fox, using discovery to expose internal knowledge of falsity. The juxtaposition shows libel law’s double edge: it can both suppress and expose, depending on how it’s aimed.

Weaponizing process, not just outcomes

Entrepreneurial litigators bank on asymmetry. Send a scorching demand letter, threaten immediate suit, and hint at extended discovery into newsroom notes, drafts, and source communications. File in a favorable jurisdiction; add public-relations muscle. For a lean newsroom, the choice is stark: settle or bleed. Techdirt’s fight against Shiva Ayyadurai’s “inventor of email” claim demonstrates the model’s cudgeling power even when defendants ultimately prevail—the costs and stress alone change future editorial decisions.

Oligarchs and transnational counsel

The book tracks global variants of the same approach. Oleg Deripaska deployed U.S. counsel to pressure outlets; Walter Soriano sued in UK courts, exploiting friendlier plaintiff standards and data-protection regimes to stymie Forensic News reporting. Elite lawyers coordinate across borders, pairing litigation with private investigators and synchronized media narratives. You learn to spot the telltales: sudden foreign filings, unusual privacy claims, and proxy plaintiffs masking true funders.

Censorship-by-cost in action

For independent outlets, the economics are crushing. Insurance deductibles, legal retainers, and e-discovery vendors can exceed a year’s reporting budget. Advertisers bail at the first whiff of controversy. Freelancers avoid sensitive topics. Even well-lawyered publications hesitate when the other side can spend freely and subpoena widely. The chilling effect is the point, not a side effect.

Key Idea

The new defamation industry sells predictability: not guaranteed wins, but guaranteed pain—enough to make watchdogs blink first.

(Note: This maps onto broader trends in “lawfare,” where litigation serves as policy by other means. Here, the policy is silence.)

You see how procedure becomes punishment. Discovery—meant to find facts—turns into a club. Plaintiffs demand entire hard drives, notes, drafts, and source identities. They subpoena critics and dissidents to scare off cooperation. Private investigators lurk outside apartments to serve papers. Even when a case is weak, months of compliance drain money and morale, and sources hear the message: talk to reporters and you might end up in someone’s crosshairs.

Discovery as intimidation

Berisha v. Lawson offers a vivid tour. Lawson’s hard drive was imaged; sources were subpoenaed; a PI stalked a dissident’s building to serve papers. In Spofford v. NHPR, after Lauren Chooljian’s investigation, plaintiffs sought reporters’ notes and recordings, prompting a judge to conduct an in camera review of nearly 3,000 pages. The uncertainty terrified sources and forced NHPR to divert funds to legal defense and security. The merits recede; the process is the punishment.

Forum choice and creative claims

Savvy plaintiffs pick courts with plaintiff-friendly tendencies or procedural gaps. States lacking strong anti-SLAPP statutes (like Wisconsin or New Hampshire during the events described) let meritless claims linger without fee-shifting. Abroad, pre‑2013 Britain made it easy for oligarchs and Saudis to sue Americans and force retractions. Even after reforms, plaintiffs pivot to data-protection rules and malicious-falsehood claims to achieve similar ends (Walter Soriano’s UK actions against Forensic News exemplify this adaptation).

Legislative pushback and limits

Rachel Ehrenfeld’s battle with Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz over Funding Evil sparked Rachel’s Law in New York and the federal SPEECH Act, letting U.S. courts refuse to enforce foreign libel judgments lacking First Amendment-level safeguards. That bipartisan success blunted classic libel tourism. Yet the workaround era arrived: rather than pure libel, plaintiffs invoke privacy, data protection, and reputational torts that can still generate injunctions or chilling discovery.

PR pressure synchronized with law

These legal maneuvers rarely operate alone. Plaintiffs seed stories questioning a reporter’s integrity, threaten donors, and sic online mobs on editors. In the Colorado Springs Gazette’s Gold Hill Mesa series, legal pressure and community blowback reinforced one another, leading editors to spike stories. The lesson: legal threats are most effective when paired with reputational smears that raise the costs of defending the truth.

What you can do

• Implement litigation holds and source-protection protocols pre-publication; assume discovery will target drafts and metadata.
• Audit insurance and consider pooled legal defense funds; negotiate coverage that includes early motions and e-discovery vendors.
• Advocate for robust state anti-SLAPP laws with fee-shifting and immediate appeal rights; support SPEECH Act-style updates for privacy claims.

Key Idea

In modern lawfare, the venue is a weapon, discovery is a tax, and PR is artillery. Together, they turn the courthouse into a censorship machine.

(Note: Compare to anti-corruption contexts abroad, where strategic lawsuits against public participation—SLAPPs—target activists. The mechanics are strikingly similar.)

Law doesn’t move in a vacuum; culture primes it. Donald Trump’s sustained assault on media legitimacy—calling journalists “the enemy of the people” and vowing to “open up” libel laws—made it respectable for elites to treat reporting as partisan sabotage. That rhetoric created a climate in which lawsuits look like necessary corrections, not power plays. Once a president praises the Gawker verdict and hires Charles Harder, allies read the cue. Soon, public figures like Don Blankenship and Joe Arpaio flood courts with suits that frequently fail but inflict heavy costs.

A cascade that normalizes lawfare

Cultural delegitimization feeds legal strategy. Judges channel frustration into opinions (Silberman’s broadside in Global Witness), and think tanks host panels echoing the same themes. Politicians propose bills to soften “actual malice.” Donors see opportunity and bankroll long campaigns. The result is a closed loop: rhetoric validates litigation; litigation produces headlines that validate more rhetoric. Even cert denials—like in Berisha—become signal flares when coupled with dissents by Thomas and Gorsuch.

Where the damage lands first

Community newsrooms sit at the blast zone. The Carroll Times Herald, after Jared Strong reported on a local officer’s conduct, faced a libel suit that a judge eventually dismissed under Sullivan. But victory didn’t undo the harm: legal bills drained cash, advertisers fled, and the family ultimately sold the paper. In Colorado Springs, Conrad Swanson’s Gold Hill Mesa reporting triggered threats and demands for source materials; editors—fearful and resource-constrained—spiked stories. In Wisconsin, Shereen Siewert’s Wausau Pilot & Review struggled to secure libel insurance and watched donors hesitate as a suit by Cory Tomczyk dragged on.

Insurance and anti-SLAPP gaps

Insurers are quiet gatekeepers. When premiums spike or coverage carves out early-motion work and e-discovery, publishers scale back investigations. Anti-SLAPP protections—designed to dismiss meritless suits quickly and shift fees—are uneven nationwide. States without robust statutes make it cheap to harass and expensive to defend. That legal geography shapes editorial maps: you see fewer watchdog pieces where plaintiffs hold home-court advantage.

The civic cost to you

When local outlets muzzle themselves, school boards, sheriffs, and developers face less scrutiny. Corruption and incompetence find cover in silence. You, the resident, pay in worse services and higher taxes. The book urges you to support subscriptions, legal-defense funds, and anti-SLAPP advocacy—not as charity, but as infrastructure for your town’s truth market.

Reversing the chill

• Demand fee-shifting anti-SLAPP laws with immediate interlocutory appeals.
• Encourage insurers to offer pooled coverage for small outlets; philanthropy can backstop deductibles.
• Normalize corrections culture without conceding to bad-faith threats—transparency builds credibility and resilience.

Key Idea

Delegitimization supplies the politics; uneven laws supply the leverage; insurance supplies the choke point. Local news bears the brunt.

(Note: This mirrors patterns in other democracies where strategic lawsuits hollow out watchdog capacity long before formal censorship appears.)

A striking thread in the book is that you don’t have to dismantle Sullivan to fight lies. In fact, current doctrine can punish egregious falsehoods when plaintiffs marshal facts and use discovery well. Dominion Voting Systems’ cases against Fox and others are the model: detailed complaints, aggressive subpoenas, and internal records revealing that key players knew (or were told) that election-fraud claims were “100% false,” as Fox’s Brainroom concluded. The $787.5 million settlement sent a deterrent signal across media.

Public-interest litigation playbook

Protect Democracy—among others—recognizes that carefully targeted defamation suits can serve as a public remedy against systemic disinformation. The goals are threefold: create a documentary record, obtain accountability (damages or retractions), and deter reckless amplification by making it expensive. The approach works best against identifiable, well-resourced actors who can’t hide behind anonymity or judgment-proof status (compare: Alex Jones’s Sandy Hook losses).

Why this matters for doctrine

If courts and litigants can curb the worst abuses under existing standards, the case for gutting Sullivan weakens. The book stresses that “actual malice” is not insurmountable when evidence shows knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard. Discovery—properly supervised—uncovers what decision-makers knew and when. Dominion and related suits demonstrate that accountability and robust press freedom can coexist.

Resource realities and equity

This path is resource-intensive. Sophisticated law firms (Clare Locke, Susman Godfrey) can prosecute these cases; small victims rarely can. That asymmetry is a policy challenge, not a doctrinal indictment. Strengthening anti-SLAPP laws and newsroom shield protections can limit abusive discovery while preserving room for plaintiffs with credible evidence to proceed. Courts can calibrate sanctions for discovery abuse and use in camera review to protect sources (as in NHPR) without foreclosing justice.

The scholarship echo chamber

Meanwhile, the doctrinal debate churns in an echo chamber where one article can shape national perception. David Logan’s piece—arguing Sullivan dulled verification incentives—was cited 17 times by Justice Gorsuch in Berisha’s cert dissent before key statistics were later corrected by MLRC’s Michael Norwick. Once ideas enter judicial opinions, they take on institutional heft, snowballing through think-tank events and amicus briefs. You learn to ask of every data point: Who benefits if this is true?

A balanced path forward

• Preserve Sullivan to protect investigative reporting and local watchdogs.
• Use targeted litigation to deter industrial-scale disinformation when evidence shows knowledge of falsity.
• Reform procedure—strong anti-SLAPP, disciplined discovery, source shields—to reduce abuse without sheltering lies.

Key Idea

The system can punish knowing falsehoods and protect hard reporting—if courts resist calls to erase Sullivan and instead fix the incentives around process.

(Note: The book’s pragmatic stance recalls classic First Amendment scholarship—defend core protections, mend the machinery.)