60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley criticized CBS’s parent company on-air for seeking to soften coverage of Donald Trump.
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful
By David Enrich
Mariner
CBS’s 60 Minutes has been the top-rated news show in America since 1974, longer than most Americans have been alive. One in three Americans watched it last year, and it reached 100 million viewers total. It is at the heart of American news, a well-funded and well-regarded powerhouse relied on by working-class, poor, rich, white, Black, Latino, and Asian Americans.
Hoping to get a merger waved through by Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, has apparently pressured the flagship newsmagazine to muffle its reporting to avoid Trump’s displeasure. Credible reporting indicates the chair of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, told 60 Minutes producers to suppress stories that were critical of Trump. The executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned, saying he was no longer able to do his job, and correspondent Scott Pelley gave an unprecedented on-air statement, noting that the Trump administration had the power to approve a proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance, and then asserting that “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways.”
The appalling story of 60 Minutes is not an isolated editorial judgment. It’s a symptom of a deeper, structural crisis in American journalism. Trump started his anti-press campaign by talking about “fake news” in 2016. But in his second term, he has turned from rhetoric to coercive power, wielding threats and lawsuits to attempt to control what is written and broadcast.
While everyone argues about the big-C Constitutional Crisis caused by a break between Trump and the Supreme Court, the small-c constitutional crisis of the press is here. The biggest news organizations are making deals, feeding the incentive for Trump to make more threats and more demands.
He sued ABC News over George Stephanopoulos saying “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape,” and ABC folded—despite having the stronger legal case—giving him a multimillion-dollar settlement. Paramount is in mediation to settle a similar Trump lawsuit over how 60 Minutes presented an interview answer by Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.
The companies he hasn’t sued, he’s tried to intimidate. Trump revoked the press pool access of the Associated Press as punishment for using the wrong words in February, and continued doing so even after the AP got a court order to prevent the exclusion. Trump signed an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private nonprofit that receives federal money and provides support to public media outlets PBS and NPR, to cease its funding of those organizations. Regardless of how this order survives in court, each attack feeds the devouring anti-press machine and can have an effect on the actual news people see and read.
In other words, “fake news” has become a serious and targeted effort to undermine independent journalism and delegitimize investigations, as its ringleader cheers on the destruction of press freedoms.
If a corrupt deal happens in the forest of Mar-a-Lago, and no one reports on it, did it really happen?
To understand the forces at work, David Enrich’s new book, Murder the Truth, is an indispensable guide. The word “chill” has become a mechanical cliché in conversations about press freedom. But reading about the growing revolution in libel and defamation lawsuits against journalists and media companies, that word suddenly recovered its original meaning. With each lawsuit Enrich recounts, it’s as if another cold finger touches the spine. On their own, they are disturbing; collectively, they seize the body politic with dread.
I’m a big fan of Enrich, a business investigations editor at The New York Times. He has a rare ability to spot the dramatic stories that underlie and drive significant legal change. His last book, Servants of the Damned, was the best thing I’ve read about the post-1970s transformation of the legal profession. In telling the story of Jones Day, the law firm that had recently become infamous for its MAGA affiliations, Enrich managed to tell a larger story about how law firms were structurally transformed into entities optimized to serve concentrated power, and how such a transformation was not just “same as it ever was,” but a significant shift from an earlier ethos of law. That book is also the best guide I know to understanding what came as a shock to many recently: the wholesale capitulation of firms like Paul, Weiss and others under the mildest pressure from Donald Trump 2.0.
In Murder the Truth, Enrich again tells a story of legal structure and cultural change. This time, his subject is the press—and the legal war against it. It is, at its core, a warning about the potential unraveling of New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 case that created the modern doctrine of press protections in the U.S. In the Sullivan framework, there are two kinds of libel law: that regarding public figures and that regarding nonpublic figures. When a statement concerns a public figure, a libel case can only be sustained if the press made a false statement with knowledge or reckless disregard of its falsity. After Sullivan, public figures had a more difficult time proving libel claims.
Enrich’s book genuinely changed my mind. Before I read it, you could have counted me in the Sullivan-skeptic camp. I didn’t have a full framework, but was open to the notion that the case was outdated, ill-suited to an era of widespread casual lies and clickbait, and likely a shield for carelessness. I tend to think we undervalue the power of common-law torts, and I’ve chronicled how press freedom claims have been exploited by corporations, and helped lead to Citizens United. However, I was persuaded otherwise by the deep reporting and storytelling of what investigations and resources actually look like in the vast majority of newsrooms around the country. As Enrich says in his acknowledgments, he was inspired to write the book by the number of aggressive legal libel letters that come pounding at the door of his employer, The New York Times, and his resulting curiosity about how smaller newsrooms dealt with them.
In gorgeous journalistic detail, he reveals a legal framework that actually mostly works in practice. Courts uphold defamation suits when journalists act with unforgivable sloppiness or malice, and they dismiss suits when reporting is backed by evidence, followed by quick retractions, or conducted in good faith.
The backdrop of billionaire attacks on the press is the collapse of local journalism.
But while the doctrine holds, the surrounding infrastructure is collapsing. Enrich moves through the homes and offices of journalists and the extreme financial stress of legal threats. Too many reporters drop out after legal challenges, and newspapers shrink. They quit not because they lost in court, but because the lawsuits themselves, which are expensive and purposefully terrifying, do the work of silencing them. Murder the Truth is littered with the bodies of small papers and independent reporters who couldn’t afford to keep going.
The real breakdown is not doctrinal, but economic. The story Enrich tells is how wealthy plaintiffs are becoming far more systematic in bringing ruinous lawsuits not to win them, but to inflict costs. For some powerful interests, the goal is not just to kill stories or outlets, but the law that makes the stories possible. A central story is the initially covert role played by Peter Thiel, who funded the lawsuit that led to the end of Gawker.
In the background of Murder the Truth is a catastrophe: the collapse of local journalism. The past two decades have seen the hollowing out of local papers across the country, driven by hedge fund buyouts and monopolistic platforms stealing ad revenues. We are currently losing local newspapers at the rate of over two a week, according to Northwestern University, and have lost more than a third of local news organizations in the last 20 years. The number of communities with no local news reporting at all has been rapidly growing, and while a few elite publications continue to do great investigations, the heart of investigative journalism in America has long been the non-flashy local story. When those local news organizations are being bullied into silence, we lose out on democracy itself, and the capacity to know even our own communities.
I came to understand through these stories that the real problem of defamatory content online is not a Sullivan problem. It’s a Section 230 problem, a reference to the provision in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shields platforms from liability for user content. Enrich’s target is not platform behavior or immunity; his in-depth reporting is far from the bowels of Zuckerberg’s empire. But this book forced me to confront how I had sloppily conflated Sullivan and Section 230. Undermining Sullivan won’t solve the business model of Big Tech, whose offerings reward inflammatory content with impunity. It would just put the final knife in the daily heroic journalism done all around the country.
Enrich excels at capturing the cast of characters in each of his stories, and he draws a clear through line from the rise of strategic lawsuits, to the well-funded ideological efforts to gut Sullivan, to a coordinated legal strategy to make the press less free, less courageous, and more beholden to power. I don’t want to give away the juiciest details, but there are many, often of just the variety that would land a smaller paper—one without massive insurance and a full-time team of the country’s best lawyers—in litigation. The carefully reported affairs and vandalism for hire seem designed as litigation bait, or a thumb in the nose of public figures who would rather organize their own public image.
Enrich does not cast himself as a Cassandra, but I read him as one. Servants of the Damned forecast the decimation of the legal profession’s moral center. Murder the Truth warns of a different kind of unraveling in the law that protects journalism.
What is an aspiring democracy without a free press? If a corrupt deal happens in the forest known as Mar-a-Lago, or the smaller thickets in state capitols and city council meeting rooms, and no one reports on it, did it really happen?
Elsewhere, the assault on the press is literal, physical, and gruesome, highlighting just how fragile our own press protections are. Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 160 journalists in Gaza, with many reportedly targeted despite wearing press vests or being in marked media facilities. Israel has restricted access for foreign journalists and destroyed dozens of media offices in Gaza. In Indonesia last year, journalists were repeatedly physically attacked in reprisal for their reporting, and the government used spyware to discourage reporting and dissent. In Hungary, the Orbán government has destroyed the press by eating it, while heaping funding on his own propaganda outfits. In Azerbaijan, the government is putting journalists on trial for smuggling. A 2025 report by the Civil Liberties Union for Europe warned that media freedom and pluralism across the European Union is being severely threatened by increased media ownership concentration, government influence on public media, and intimidation of journalists.
And in the U.S.? Well, it might look slightly better, but in the country that truly pioneered the free press as the Fourth Estate, the independent press is looking less like an estate and more like a small ragtag crew of intrepid reporters, and a few large institutional leaders, some of whom are willing to reshape their views to please the King. This is not just a shift in tone—it is a shift in structure, in power, and in law. From 60 Minutes to local papers, the recent and sudden loss of press independence signals deep democratic dysfunction.
