Christiane Amanpour, the eponymous host of PBS's Amanpour & Co., fretted Thursday over “the state of freedom of speech in America” under President Trump with reporter David Enrich, on public media once again to discuss his recent anti-Trump book Murder The Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. Enrich has become a popular figure on PBS and NPR of late, warning of the Trump administration’s “chilling effect” on legacy media.
Amanpour's show introduction matter-of-factly accused Trump of waging a "war on facts."
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Also ahead, "Murder the Truth," Trump's war on facts according to author and New York Times Deputy Investigations Editor David Enrich, who joins Hari Srinivasan to discuss his new book.
Her introduction to colleague Hari Sreenivasan's interview with the Times' Enrich put PBS's stubborn lack of objectivity on display.
AMANPOUR: Now, Trump's assault on higher education landed a big fish. Columbia University has agreed to pay over $220 million to settle their fight. Meanwhile, his administration's attack on the media is in full swing, with Congress approving drastic public broadcasting cuts and lawsuits that keep on coming.
Just a day after CBS's decision to cancel the number one Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert [sic] sent shockwaves, the president hit The Wall Street Journal with an unprecedented $20 billion libel suit. Hari Sreenivasan unpacks all of this and the state of freedom of speech in America with David Enrich, Deputy Investigations Editor at The New York Times.
As usual, PBS hosts equate "freedom of speech" with taxpayer-funded leftist tilt. Sreenivasan and Enrich preened over the main subject of his book, the famous 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which created a massive burden for plaintiffs of proving not just defamation, but malice in false reporting on public figures.
Coincidentally, the pre-taped interview discussed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the trashy former website Gawker before the wrestler’s death had been announced.
SREENIVASAN: You go through a number of different challenges, the cases that have been played out, and you spent quite a bit of time on the case of Gawker and Hulk Hogan. For people a little unfamiliar with that, Peter Thiel, who we think of as a tech titan, was the force that was funding that. Why was that case so important?
Enrich actually admitted more or less that Hogan had a case that Gawker violated his privacy by publishing a sex tape involving him, but Enrich was unhappy about tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s having “masterminded and bankrolled” Hogan’s lawsuit as a revenge plot.
He complained of Trump having stripped “organizations like PBS and NPR and their member stations of funding….at least some of them have been on the conservative agenda for years, but I do not think it's a coincidence that we have a president who, and an administration that is really hell-bent on demonizing the media and avoiding the scrutiny that the media would normally bring to a very polarizing and controversial administration."
The guy who accuses Trump and conservatives of "murdering the truth" has a problem with people demonizing their opponents? PBS and NPR have routinely demonized the Right with government money.
Inevitably the talk turned to every media liberal’s favorite “comedy” show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and paranoia regarding whether the expensive show’s cancellation (which is 10 long months away) was somehow related to Paramount’s recently cleared merger with Skydance Media. (Paramount is the parent company of CBS.)
SREENIVASAN: ….there's a lot of speculation wondering how much of this is business versus how much of this is, you know, silencing a critic in Stephen Colbert, especially days after he criticized the very bargain that Paramount struck with the government?
ENRICH: Yeah. And I don't know what the truth is here, but it's impossible to ignore the timing of it. And it certainly, at the very least, it's quite a coincidence that shortly after Colbert criticizes the settlement with Trump, his show is canceled.
