Pounding Beers in a Shed, and Other Dispatches from the War on Free Speech
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last episode we discussed the campaign to overturn the Supreme Court decision that protects reporters’ ability to criticize and investigate people in power.
But even with that decision still in place, reporter David Enrich has discovered a shocking wave of legal attacks that is being waged on journalists in towns and cities across the country. These are often reporters at tiny, local outlets, trying to hold people accountable in their communities.
And these legal claims don’t even have to succeed - and they frequently don’t - to shut down reporters.
Plus, Brian waxes poetic about the first amendment, under the night sky.
This is part two of our series about David Enrich’s reporting from his book “Murder the Truth”. Listen to part one first – it’s called “Freedom of the press is great, until you’re the target.”
In our newsletter this week – Brian tells a personal story about how his lawyers helped him fend off a legal threat. Check that out at: www.kcrw.com/questioneverything
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today, on question everything, how high-powered people in cities and towns across America are targeting reporters, going after their stories, and have been for a while now, right under our noses. |
| 0:15.3 | So you had the great honor and pleasure of reporting alongside me for several years in the UK. |
| 0:30.7 | Yeah. |
| 0:31.5 | Honor, pleasure. |
| 0:34.4 | This is Hamza Syed. |
| 0:35.6 | He was on the show recently. |
| 0:37.1 | He and I reported together in Britain when we were making this series called the Trojan Horse Affair for Serial and the New York Times. It was my first time doing investigative reporting over there. |
| 0:46.0 | I mean, it was a spectacle, to be honest. It was a daily pantomime watching you try to report in Britain. You kept referencing the First Amendment repeatedly. |
| 0:56.8 | You kind of kept going back to how you miss it. |
| 0:59.0 | It would come up in social conversations. |
| 1:01.0 | Really? |
| 1:01.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:02.8 | I really miss the First Amendment. |
| 1:06.8 | Wales. |
| 1:07.3 | You said that in Wales, like gazing at the stars. |
| 1:13.6 | So that's how... |
| 1:14.9 | I mean, I remember feeling that. I don't remember saying it as much. |
| 1:17.9 | You'd say it. You chair it. You share it. |
| 1:19.9 | I learned from doing that project, apparently somewhat melodramatically, |
| 1:23.6 | that while the United Kingdom is a democracy and yet has a free press, |
| 1:27.1 | what that means having a free press, |
| 1:32.7 | what that means having a free press is way different in practice than what it means over here. |
... |
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