E110: Murder the Truth

In this episode, Rebecca Snyder sits down with David Enrich, an investigative reporter at The New York Times and author of the new book Murder the Truth. They discuss the growing use of "lawfare"—legal actions weaponized by wealthy and powerful figures—to silence journalists and independent voices. David shares insights into the chilling impact of lawsuits on local journalism, the critical importance of the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times vs. Sullivan, and the contemporary threats to press freedom. Tune in for a thought-provoking exploration of what's at stake for democracy when investigative journalism comes under attack.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing David Enrich and Murder the Truth
• 1:13 What is Lawfare?
• 4:17 The Chilling Effect on Local Journalism
• 18:51 Understanding New York Times vs. Sullivan
• 31:49 The Future of Press Freedom

Transcript

0:01

Welcome, we're here today with David Enrich, who is the author of Murder the Truth and a New York Times reporter. So David, welcome to the program. So tell us a little bit about sort what you do on the day job and then we'll get into the book because this is not your first time publishing. So we wanna hear a little bit more about that in context, but tell us what's going on. So as you said, I work at the New York Times. I run a small team of investigative reporters. And I currently work in the business section. So it's primarily business-related things. we have a pretty broad understanding of what constitutes a business story. So yeah, and I do some of my own reporting and writing as well. so, yeah, as you mentioned, this is my fourth book. and the others have been about law firms, big banks, things like that. So tell us a little bit about Murder the Truth, which it's in bookstores now and they can get it in all the usual places, Amazon and so forth. But tell us more about what this book is about. So at its core, the book is about how there is a really broad, aggressive, and increasingly successful campaign by rich and powerful people to muzzle journalists and others who write critical things or uncover uncomfortable secrets about people with power and money. And more specifically, it is about the Supreme Court's case decision in 1964 in New York Times versus Sullivan, which is enabled basically most investigative journalism today, but it's also looking at and across the country how a lot of small local publishers and independent journalists are increasingly under just tremendous pressure from people that they write about who are using legal threats and lawsuits to intimidate and punish and deter them. so, and the book tells the stories of quite a few journalists who are, you know, not working at places like the New York Times, where they've just been driven to the financial and in some cases psychological brink because of threats and litigation they've faced as a result of just really doing very good and fearless journalism. And they've paid a really steep price for that. And one of the theses of the book, I guess, is that that kind of journalism, A, is really important. And B, it's increasingly under threat. that's not just like with a local newspaper. It includes independent journalists, people with a substack or a podcast. And we've just seen this explosion in kind of new voices on the media scene in the past several years. And which I think is a really like healthy, cool trend. And it's really good for democracy and it's really good for the mainstream media to face new sources of competition. But the weaponized like lawfare that I write about in this book poses a really existential threat to that kind of journalism, I believe. Well, I wholeheartedly agree. And I think there's a couple of things that I wanted to bring up. I love the use of the term lawfare. And I think we're seeing that more and more when we look at anti-SLAP statutes not really keeping up with the weaponization of the courts and stifling free speech. And some of the broader economic trends that are putting a lot of pressure on small newsrooms. If we look at Maryland, Delaware and DC where MDDC is based, 90 % of our newsrooms are five to seven people. And the stakes are really high. If you get sued at a newsroom that has a margin like a five to seven person newsroom would, it can be devastating. And so tell me a little bit about the chilling effects that you've seen in those small spaces. And when we think about small spaces, That's really local news. So they're really super close to what's happening in the fray. Well, just to back up for one second, I think it might be worth just saying how I got onto this project in the first place, which is that, well, no, it's relevant to what we're talking about here, which is why I bring it up. And so basically at the New York Times, I started noticing, and really in like the early 2020s, that basically every time we were tackling what we thought was an important topic that involved a richer, powerful person or institution, we were getting bombarded with these legal threat letters and occasionally getting sued. you know, The New York Times has like a lot of lawyers. have a lot of experience dealing with that stuff. It's so we're okay. But I just started wondering what that experience was like at a local level or if you're an independent journalist. And so I can't remember if I contacted you or not, but I reached out to the press associations in almost all states, all over the country and just started asking what they were seeing. And a lot of people, and sorry, you might have been one of those people, I just cannot remember, but I got connected. As I talked to people at the press associations, I got connected to a ton of local journalists, local publishers, local media lawyers. And yet I just started hearing these crazy stories and it ranges. this brings me to the chilling effect and it ranges from, you know, there's a case I detail in the book involving a guy named Scott Steadman who doesn't work for a news outlet. He created his own news outlet called Forensic News and made the mistake of like writing not the mistake, but he made what turned out to be a fateful decision to start writing about Russian oligarchs and people who enabled them. He faced lawsuits, he faced threats, and he just couldn't take it. And after years of litigation and threats, and he after having had to check himself into a hospital to deal with debilitating panic attacks as a result of this, decided to just quit journalism altogether. so there are a handful of stories in the book like that. a mundane, but like equally pernicious thing is I tell this story about a local paper in Colorado, where a reporter there was doing some really kind of intrepid journalism about environmental risks posed and safety risks posed by a big real estate development in his town. you know, the reporting was dogged. I've gone through his notes. I've gone through his, like, seen all of his interviews. I've re-interviewed some of the people, I've been to the site that he wrote about, and his reporting was solid. I'm not saying that it was complete, like there wasn't another side to the story. There was, and he captured it, but it was a solid set of investigative reporting. The local real estate development company hired a very high-priced law firm that started bombarding this small paper with threats and threatened litigation. It started using the State Open Records Act to try and identify his sources. Mmm. And the paper, which was owned by a local billionaire, quickly got cold feet and started preventing him or at least diluting what he was writing, in some cases, stories altogether. so that's another type of chilling effect. And the list goes on, these come in all different shapes and sizes, but the end result is that people who are writing in institutions that are writing about powerful local or national or even international figures. are feeling like they basically face a choice between risking their livelihoods or their publications livelihood on the one hand, or backing down in the face of threats and either not covering things that they think are important or at least kind of diluting their coverage. And both of those outcomes are just like completely at odds with what I think the First Amendment is all about. 100%. And I think, when you when you kind of follow those threads, even if someone is deciding, OK, well, we're going to spend the money to to fight these lawsuits and so forth, that is taking time away from other work that they could and should be doing. It is making, you know, trying to find out who the sources are that's making sources more reluctant to come forward and to be a part of it, as well as, you know, sort of. grinding down on the economic wellbeing of the news publication. So when you think of that and it feels so stark, like how can someone abuse the legal system in this way? It kind of begs the question, how can people get away with this? And what's wrong with the system or is it just a... a compilation of a lot of different things or is there one sort of smoking gun that you're like, well, this is the problem, let's fix that. No, I don't think it's that simple, unfortunately. I think that there are... Look, the United States has some of the best press freedom protections in the world. The First Amendment is very powerful and the Supreme Court has enforced it quite rigorously, I think, over the years. The problem is that there's just like a real power imbalance, I think, between the people doing the journalism. And it's not just journalists, by the way, right? It's, and I realize we're both journalists and this is probably for primarily an audience of journalists, but it's also just like a local person who circulates an online petition about a real estate project or like writes a nasty restaurant review on Yelp. And there's a whole range of just public speech that is protected by the first amendment, but that is increasingly being challenged by weaponized lawsuits. I mean, so I think that part of the problem is that there's just a huge power asymmetry between the journalists or just members of the public. who are doing the writing and doing the criticizing and doing the investigating on the one hand, and then often the people or institutions that they, that are the subjects of what they're writing. And so, you know, it's like, if you are someone with a hundred million dollars and you don't like the coverage in your local paper or a local blog or in a local sub-stack newsletter, it is not that expensive for you to send a threatening letter, even to file a lawsuit, even if you know that you're going to lose, even if you, if the state you live in has a relatively strong anti-SLAPP law. Still worth a try. attorney fees, you have $100 million. Like you're going to pay what like 10, 20, $100,000 maybe that may well be a price worth winning on the off chance that you can and you can even in an unsuccessful lawsuit, even when it gets anti slapped, you can still drive up by a huge amount of the cost of that publication or that journalist has to pay because they're liable insurance when it comes up for renewal, the insurer is going to see you guys dude and they I mean, I'm sure they care whether you win or lose but I've seen this over and over again. People that survive these lawsuits and get them dismissed or win on summary judgment, they are still seeing when their liable insurance comes up for renewal, the rates are going through the roof, the deductibles are going through the roof. And so this is a, it's a financial price that publications, especially small ones pay for years into the future. it creates this, it forces people to make a really uncomfortable choice between jeopardizing their financial health and sticking to their guns. And I don't really know what the solution is to that. mean, there's, you know, this is kind of self-serving, but I think one solution is to like educate first journalists and then secondarily a broader swath of the public about the importance of not only free speech, because I think everyone recognizes that kind of conceptually, but the importance of cases like New York Times versus Sullivan and really understanding the context and history of those cases and the threats of them that we're seeing. that we're seeing playing out kind of all over the country right now on a micro level, which it really adds up to something. And I think it's a very, it's not by accident. It is something that has, it's not just kind of one thing happening over here and other than happening over there randomly. It's like, this is a part of a concerted effort primarily on the right to make it harder for journalists, whether they work at a place like the New York Times or have a substack to, you know, speak truth to power. And I think that's a really dangerous. the trend that we're seeing right now. Well, and I want to get to New York Times versus Sullivan, but I first want to go back to sort of the landscape as smaller newspapers close and you lose local journalism, whether it's through the economic pressures, whether it's through lawsuits or whatnot, what that means for communities. think Pew did a great research study now a couple of years old that shows that the incidence of corruption and malfeasance on the part of local governments just skyrocket. Have you, can you talk a little bit about sort of what happens when the worst happens? It's really interesting because so first of all, there's all this rich anecdotal evidence of what happens in various communities. And I've actually seen that in my community. I live just outside of New York City. And we lost our local papers a couple of years ago. They just went out of business. And they've actually now started up again under different ownership and a different name, which is great. But in that, in those intervening periods, it was just incredible to see the misinformation flourishing and the primary local news source became Facebook. And there was a Facebook group where for our zip code basically, where people were sharing information, asking questions. And it was just like, nonsense was prevailing. All these conspiracy theories about like stupid stuff, like about like, there was a new sidewalk being or a new crosswalk being installed. And it was there's like a huge conservative outcry about how the way that was being painted was going to be dangerous. you know, it goes on. It's on the both the right and the left. And it but it was like no one was being served by it. And The existence of the local newspaper and the return of the local newspaper did not solve that problem, but it made it better. and so I saw that up close and personal. know everyone has kind of their own stories about this, but the interesting thing here, and you kind of alluded to this is that there's really good data on it as well. That, I mean, as you said, the, uh, civic participation in general declines sharply when a town or a community loses a reliable local news source. Voter registration and voting turnout goes down misinformation goes up prices tend to go up and there's just all sorts of bad direct consequences corruption goes up and also the direct causal connections between losing a reliable source of news and and just people not only being informed informed but having a having someone to kind of call balls and strikes and to hold people accountable when they abuse their power. It's so important and it's, I mean, obviously this is happening all over the country right now. Right, in such a sort of free for all forum like you have on social media, which does not have a legal burden to vet, to vouch for anything that we've posted on their platform, know, news media does have sort of a moral standard, but it also has a legal standard that they are responsible for what they post. And so you get better sourcing, stronger reporting, you know, rather than me just spouting off to be like, I don't like the way that's gonna go, so I'm gonna grind on it. Also, just in general, mean, I think having people who are professional journalists, and again, that takes many different shapes and sizes. That does not mean you need to have gone to day school. does not mean you have to work at an actual newspaper, but people who view themselves as professional journalists and take the standards seriously, that makes a huge difference. And as opposed to people who are just like pissed off about something and take to Facebook to complain about it, and then that's treated as a source of news when... It's just not right. And it's not about me agreeing or disagreeing with that person's perspective, but it's just not a reliable source of information. Anyway, I'm preaching to the choir here. Sorry. no, no, but I just a little detour there. Like I think, you know, there's also another study that talks about how few Americans actually know any journalists. And granted, the news media world has shrunk substantially and all the local news ecosystems report in the news desert reports show that. But we sort of talk about at our press association, sort of the act of journalism and adhering to those professional standards of journalism. But. How much of, or do you think that some of this is related to just a lack of media literacy and a lack of kind of understanding about at a core level what journalism is? I think it's both. think also, and here's a little bit of like self criticism, not of me personally, but of the media in general. I mean, I think that the media in general has been a little like exclusionary in the past in terms of who we treat as one of our own. And so, you know, the act of journalism to me is providing valuable trusted information to the public and bringing stuff to light that might not otherwise come to light. And that's And right now we've obviously got an explosion of new kind of mediums to do that in, whether it's, you know, social media or a podcast or whatever. And just because someone is purely operating on that level to me doesn't mean they're not a journalist. It just means maybe we've been a little too narrow in how we conceive of journalists. And I think if you frame it that way and you try to imbue someone who is bringing stuff to light consistently on social media. the day to earn journalists, maybe that first of all, that kind of solves the problem of who would like you've never met a journalist. Well, yes, you have. Like there's but it also I think by treating people with the respect that they deserve and taking them seriously, even when they are doing something that is, you know, not exactly how I was raised to be a journalist or you were raised to be a journalist. think maybe giving them that benefit of the doubt and taking them seriously and listening to them and hearing them. That may be some of our standards that we've been trained on and they can be really valuable. will rub off a little bit and, and they'll take themselves more seriously and realize this is not just, it's not always just about getting clicks and getting retweets or whatever. It's about being a trusted source and that's how you build credibility. And that's how you really get your message to be taken seriously. Yeah, well, and I want to go to New York Times versus Sullivan because that is sort of that that bulwark. Like that's what everything rests on in terms of investigative reporting. So for people who are not up on that case, 1964, you know, we're going into the way back machine. Tell us why it's important and what it is. I mean, do you want me to tell you a little bit about the history? know I'm sure you know, but yeah, okay. I mean, it's just such a good story, I think. Okay, so in 1960, a full page ad ran in the New York Times and was paid for by supporters of Martin Luther King. And it was basically a fundraising appeal to pay for like voter registration drives in the South. the ad, you can just like Google it online. It's called Heed Their Rising Voices. And you can see it for yourself. And it's a lot of kind of small print text. And... It in the small print text, it kind of describes this litany of abuses committed by racist Southern or Southern officials who were essentially trying to preserve white supremacy in the South. and, know, the gist of the ad is completely true. Most of the facts in the ad are true, but some of them are wrong or exaggerated. And so there are points where they're detailing the racist and kind of violent behavior of Southern officials where they got some facts wrong. So the ad ran and it was, it came to the attention of a guy named L.B. Sullivan, who was basically in charge of the police force in Montgomery, Alabama. And Sullivan was not named in the ad. No one was named in the ad, in fact. But the Montgomery, Alabama police force was rightly among the places that was very severely condemned because they were doing terrible things. However, couple of the smaller details about the Montgomery police force were wrong. And so Sullivan sued the New York Times for half a million dollars, which at the time was a lot of money. Yeah. And I mean, it still is a lot of money for me. At the time it was a very large amount of money for the New York Times. so the case went to trial in Montgomery in a courtroom presided over by a white supremacist judge and with jurors who were white and some of them were dressed in Confederate costumes. And you will not be surprised to hear that they quickly returned a verdict in favor of L.B. Sullivan and against the New York Times. And so that half million dollar verdict, I mean, first of all, it sent a very loud signal to the New York Times that they could not afford to face more lawsuits like this. And so they pulled their reporters out of Alabama. They urged them to stop writing about institutional racism in the South. So there's a very clear chilling effect. And on the flip side. other people in the South saw the success that Sullivan had, and it inspired this horde of copycat lawsuits against other national news outlets. So like the big TV broadcasters, for example. And it was an explicit effort to basically make it so financially painful to operate in the South and to write about the South that it led other outlets to kind of tamp down on their coverage of the civil rights movement. So it was a very deliberate campaign by Southern officials to kind of muzzle the national press. Anyway, the Times appealed the decision. the state Supreme Court turned them down. And so that left one option, which was the US Supreme Court. And in 1964, the court heard the case and then unanimously decided the case against Sullivan and for the New York Times. So they reversed the lower court's decisions. And the Supreme Court's rationale was really interesting and important. So basically, they found that in a democracy that values free speech, people need to have the breathing room. to be able to aggressively and sharply criticize and interrogate and investigate people who hold power, especially government officials. And if there is a cloud of litigation hanging over you every time you write about someone, that if you get a fact or two wrong by mistake, you're going to get sued into oblivion, you will very quickly decide not to write about that kind of stuff, or you will cease to exist because you will be sued so many times. And so the court said they were going to basically create a much higher bar for lawsuits like that to prevail. And so they created what's become known as the actual malice standard, which is not really about malice in the common sense of the word. The standard is basically that if you're a public figure or public official, and you are suing someone for defamation, you need to prove a couple of things. obviously, first of all, you need to prove that the facts at issue were incorrect. And you also need to prove that your reputation was injured, which is, those are kind of obvious. What was less obvious is that you had to also, on top of that, prove that whoever spoke or wrote these defamatory falsehoods either knew that what they were writing was false. So in other words, they were lying or acted with reckless disregard for the accuracy of what they were writing. So basically you either had to prove that the person was lying or was just being super reckless and irresponsible about what they were doing. And again, you could still prove that, right? There was still lots of liable lawsuits that showed when journalists were reckless or spreading false information or lies, you could be held accountable. But it also meant that public officials could not just run around seizing on a small inaccuracy or something that was inadvertent or that it really truly was by mistake and put someone out of business for doing that. And so this really, it ushered in this golden age of journalism, it really brought on the investigative journalism era in the US. It was not a coincidence that reporters started uncovering huge wrongdoing in Vietnam. There was Watergate. These things were all, you know, they were result of many things, but they were also a direct result of Sullivan. They would not have been able to happen without the legal protections that the Supreme Court had granted. And then you have the anti-slap statutes that you see in many states now, I think 34, that also provide a mechanism to quickly dismiss if they are slap suits. But it does feel like everything old is new again. know, sort of the landscape that you just discussed in the early 60s is what you're basically saying is happening now with rich and powerful people across, not just in one area of the country or around one issue, but across the board. And we have a very different Supreme Court now. So what does Times versus Sullivan, do you feel like it's at risk now? Where is it now and where is it going? Well, where it's at now is it still exists in all its glory, right? But what's happened is that there has been a really well-oiled campaign in the past decade to try and build support for overturning it, which has had a bunch of success. we've got now at least two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who have publicly said in opinions that they want to overturn it. We have a whole lot of lower court judges. like federal appeals court judges on down at both the federal and state level who have endorsed the call to overturn it. We have groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Federalist Society, both at a national level and at state and local levels, pushing their members to do research and academic work to kind of undercut the ideas of Sullivan. And you've got lawyers who are aligned in this, bringing more more suits, not only because they want to win money for their clients, but also because they're looking for appropriate vehicles to get to the Supreme Court to overturn Sullivan. And one of the things, and I don't know if it's going to be successful or not at the Supreme Court level, but already what we're seeing is that, you know, normally a case that fails, a lawsuit that clearly fails to meet the threshold of Sullivan, a judge would normally just dismiss that very quickly, regardless of the actual facts. the case, right? If there's not any evidence alleged in the actual lawsuit that the person acted with quote unquote actual malice, the case is out, right? It's just like not really that hard. And what I've been seeing, and I do not have data on this, but what I've been seeing anecdotally, and I've been hearing from a lot of lawyers on the ground, is that that process of getting things dismissed has really slowed down. And I think part of the reason it's slowed down is that there are more more judges at both the state and federal level who are voicing who are kind of taking up Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch's arguments and inciting them in their opinions. And so that means in a practical level, for in for journalists or news outlets or anyone else who faces these lawsuits, that these things are just a lot more painful and expensive and long lasting to deal with. and that's with Sullivan still being the law of the land. And look, there are at least two votes to overturn it. I obviously don't have a crystal ball. I'm a lousy tracker for predicting these things. I don't know if there two or three more votes. One shorter term intermediate option might be, and again, this is me speculating, might be for the court not to take a look at overturning Sullivan outright, but you have to chip away around the edges at some of the subsequent cases that cemented and expanded Sullivan's reach, which I think would be dangerous for lot of reasons. The bottom line is that even with Sullivan right now, because of this kind of orchestrated attack that I described in the book, there is, it is having a real kind of squeezing effect on a lot of journalists, especially those who work for smaller outlets or out there on their own. Well, it sounds like everyone over across the country on a local level, people are sort of testing and chipping away and sort of, and judges are kind of buying into that and being like, huh, is this the one? Is this how, what are the parameters? And at the very least, you know, that multitude of cases is setting precedent and narrowing as it goes along. And the net effect for your local journalist who's trying to uncover something within one's own community is that they don't have the time because their attention is being pulled in other ways. They're worried about fiscal attack and they ultimately are not going to be successful and the whole community loses out. And so that sort of is what you are examining in the book. So how did you stay peppy in your life? to write such a depressing book. I mean, that's a really grim picture. And yet you get up and report every day. How are you managing? I don't know. I've never thought about that way. There's a lovely wife and two lovely kids and a lovely dog. And, you know, the sun is shining a lot. I don't know, I've got to say it like, no one's asked me that question, actually. And I guess it's kind of obvious. But I really I think I did like really draw energy from the reporting of this book and the writing of this book because like, hey, I really I feel passionately about it. I've been a journalist my entire adult life. I care about this and I felt that it was important for someone who I'm in a position of relative power because I work at the New York Times and I have a big book publisher behind me to really kind of start to examine some of these big law firms, for example, that are, you know, by their nature, litigious and have been leading this charge to not only sue and threaten people, but to try to overturn Sullivan. But I also just like around the country, I like so many. incredible conversations and meetings with just really inspiring local journalists who, in some cases, have stood up against just enormous odds and have often prevailed. They've been ground down and they've faced just incredible stress and anxiety and sometimes really like actual, tangible bad health effects as a result of this and certainly bad financial effects. And they are just committed to their jobs and their jobs are harder than mine. I mean, I work really hard, but like... of the local news journalists that is like wolves at the door and trying to cover everything, it astounds all of us. It is. inspiring. It inspired me a lot in it. Like, you know, I'm a pretty motivated person. So it's not like I needed motivation to do this. I like, I did draw a lot of inspiration from that. And I mean, there's just a lot of courageous local journalism going on. And it's it that is what makes our democracy work, in large part. And so, yeah. issue was once a local issue. You know, I work a lot on the state level and I'm always telling our member publications, if you hear something that's happening on the local level, chances are it's going to bubble up to the state level. And then it bubbles on up at the national level. It all starts in those local communities. And so I wanted to kind of look now to the future. You paint this picture of know, diminishing effectiveness of New York Times versus Sullivan, we've sort of ascertained there's no simple answer. There's no like root cause. What do you suggest people do? I mean, it can't just be love your local journalist. It can't necessarily just be, you know, stand up and speak truth to power when you can. What do you think is what are the tools in the quiver or the arrows in the quiver? I don't know. There's, everyone asks me that question and I don't have a good answer, I'm afraid. Like there's, think, I mean, this is self-serving. You can read books like mine and like educate yourself on these issues and kind of spread the word. I do think that's, I mean, not to buy my book, go to a library and get my book or whatever, but like read about these topics, understand the detail and the nuance behind these Supreme Court cases. And in part because it helps you understand their importance. and the way the many ways they protect you, whether you're a journalist or not. um, uh, and I think just like, I look, think for those of your listeners who are in the media, like I think certainly at a national level, think there's a, obviously been a huge crisis in trust or lack of trust in the media, which has been growing for a while now, but it's really reached, I think, very bad proportions at this point. And I think that. journalists, especially on the national level, really need to do a better job of looking in the mirror and thinking about how we got into this mess. Because some of it's driven by external stuff. It's driven by people like Trump, who are actively seeking to delegitimize us and weaken us because, you know, doing so makes it easier for them to spread lies and distortions and conspiracy theories. But part of it's our fault. you know, I think we have institutionally or across the industry really not been as good as we need to at owning up to mistakes. We're good at correcting factual errors and things like that, generally, but we're not as good when we get kind of a line of coverage, maybe a little bit wrong. we have, everyone's got their biases. I have mine, I'm sure you have yours. And sometimes those biases affect how we're writing about broad topics. And sometimes it's like, and it's kind of unavoidable, but I think there have been times, there in fact definitely have been times where I think those biases sometimes subconsciously have led us to come down too hard on a person or an institution and other times to come to not be tough enough. And I think it's really healthy for the media to be looking in the mirror and figuring out new and transparent ways to deal with that and to allow ourselves to be held accountable. And I think that would really help with some of the lack of trust that has built up over the years. Again, I don't really know how to do that. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. and talking with colleagues about that. And the problem is that when we are candid about our mistakes and things we'd like to do differently, oftentimes in this like super polarized partisan environment, that just becomes ammunition for a bad faith attacks. And so I don't know, it's really complicated. I wish I had a good clean answer, but I don't. Well, I mean, if you had a really good, clean answer, then you would have written another book about it and we'd have our marching orders and life would be good. You know, it occurs to me, though, that like where the you sort of you go to the heat and you also think about where you can exert the most the most control. Like when the world is chaotic, I find my world shrinking a little bit and thinking about, OK, well, what can I do here? Like I can't I literally cannot focus on what's happening. in faraway places that nobody cares what I think. But I can look to my local publication or my local media landscape and think about, how am I contributing to this? Like, how are my actions affecting? And that's such an unsatisfying answer because it's not like a, well, if we just do this, it'll be better. But just as that concerted orchestrated effort. And I think it's really important to have books like Murder the Truth because you're taking all of those disparate little case studies and incidents and painting this big picture about this is what's happening. But then it also has to drill back down and say, okay, well, we do have to look in the mirror locally. We have to provide support. We have to look at are there legislative things that we can do at the local level to sustain, to support and see it sort of hopefully bubble up again. Cause the stakes are really high. I mean, when we look at the injustices that, Times versus Sullivan helped to usher in that golden age of reporting, I don't think anybody wants to go back to a time where all that swept under the rug, no matter the political stripe. And so I think, Murder of the Truth can really be seen as a wake-up call. You're piecing together those puzzle bits to create this picture that's very stark and hopefully will spark people to action at whatever level they feel comfortable operating in. I think that's what I took away from. I'm into that. I couldn't have said it better myself. I hope it is a wake up call for some people. Yeah. So I also, I want to check in to see if you're planning anything new coming up. This is your fourth book that you've done. So are you hard at work sort of thinking through what you want to do next or where you want to go? Honestly, in terms of books, no, I'm not. am trying to give myself a little space. The book only came out three days ago. I think any author would be lying if they said that even before their book comes out, that they're not already stressing about, I ever be able to write another book? Will I ever find another good topic? I'm definitely not immune to that. I am cutting myself a little slack this week at least. Well, cut yourself some slack. We're eager to see what you do next. And thank you for the reporting and the work that you've done for this. And hopefully we'll have you back again sometime soon. All right. Thanks.