This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report, with part two about our discussion of the new book,

Murder the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment, and a secret campaign to protect the powerful.

The name of the new book by David Enrich, the Business Investigations editor at the New York Times.

David looks at how President Trump and his allies are pushing to overturn protections for the press to investigate public figures,

a right guaranteed by the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times

versus Sullivan. In 2019, Democracy Now spoke to James Goodale, former Vice President and

General Counsel for the New York Times, who talked about the significance of the Sullivan case.

New York Times versus Sullivan is a famous case because it changed the law of libel and made the libel law much more difficult to apply to public figures and public officials

who say all sorts of crazy things, like Trump does, by the way, about their opponents or about

this and about that.

Before the Sullivan case, the law favored people who wanted to sue those who were making

such statements.

And this was happening in the South.

This is at the time of Civil Rights Movement movement where the New York Times, Northern papers

were covering what was going on in the South.

And the South, if I can call it that, came up with a solution to deal with the bad stories.

They would sue.

So there are all sorts of politicians in the South who sued media

companies. Sullivan sued the New York Times. That was James Goodell, the former Vice President

General Counsel for the New York Times, speaking back in 2019. We now continue our conversation

with David Enrich, author of Murder the Truth, Fear, the First Amendment, and a secret campaign to protect the powerful.

So you were at the Times, and as you described in part one of our conversation, you started to see news organizations and started to investigate small and large being threatened.

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