Freedom of the press is great, until you're the target
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For decades, a Supreme Court decision called New York Times vs Sullivan was widely beloved by people across the political spectrum. Hailed as a decision that gave the first amendment teeth and made our country great.
But recently, under our noses, some of the same people who once sang its praises have turned against it.
The story of the growing movement that is trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn one of the strongest protections for speech and the press in America.
This is part one of a two part series about the book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by Times investigative editor David Enrich.
Sign up for our newsletter here to hear about one of Brian’s own legal battles: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, hey, Brian here. |
| 0:01.5 | Today on the show, the people who are trying to disembowel the First Amendment. |
| 0:11.0 | I want to tell you a little story here about one man's change of heart. |
| 0:16.7 | And I'm sharing this because it's a change of heart that is also happening writ large across the country in the hearts of politicians and lawyers and judges. |
| 0:25.5 | And it presents a devastating threat to free speech and just the ability for any of us to question and criticize people in power. |
| 0:36.3 | It starts in 1964. |
| 0:38.6 | A 25-year-old law clerk named Alan Dershowitz showed up to his job at the Supreme Court, |
| 0:43.8 | where he was working for one of the justices. |
| 0:46.4 | This was in the thick of the civil rights movement, and the justices were about to issue |
| 0:50.1 | a decision in an important case. |
| 0:53.2 | Four years earlier, civil rights activists had run a full-page ad in the New York Times, |
| 0:58.3 | criticizing the way officials in southern states had cracked down on protesters, and specifically |
| 1:03.9 | on Martin Luther King Jr. |
| 1:06.1 | There were some inaccuracies and exaggerations in the ad. |
| 1:09.4 | For instance, it said King had been arrested |
| 1:11.5 | seven times when it was actually four, and that police had padlocked student protesters |
| 1:16.4 | inside a dining hall, which hadn't happened. And so a city commissioner in Montgomery, |
| 1:21.3 | Alabama, named L.B. Sullivan, sued the New York Times for defamation. Now, for an article or statement or an ad or anything else to be defamatory legally, it has to |
| 1:32.5 | harm your reputation and it has to be false. A true statement can't be defamatory. Neither, |
| 1:39.0 | by the way, can an opinion or satire. Elv. Sullivan wasn't even named in the civil rights ad, |
| 1:44.9 | but he claimed he was being defamed simply by being an Alabama official |
| 1:48.6 | involved in the effort to go after protesters. |
... |
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