NPR loves The New York Times, and vice versa. On Tuesday, NPR's Fresh Air granted most of its hour to a 44-minute interview with David Enrich, the paper's business investigations editor. His new book focusing on Donald Trump and Justice Clarence Thomas is brazenly titled Murder The Truth: Fear, The First Amendment, And A Secret Campaign To Protect The Powerful.
NPR host Tonya Mosley never asked Enrich if that title was truly appropriate when reporters damage someone's reputation with maliciously inaccurate reporting. What about reporters murdering the truth? The online headline is:
'Murder the Truth' describes a campaign to silence journalists and curb free speech
Nowhere in this 44 minutes did they discuss cases outside Enrich's picture of crusading progressive journalists versus obstreperous capitalist oligarchs. For example, they never raised the case Fox News vs. Dominion Voting Systems, since Enrich and NPR hate Fox News and don't consider them journalists.
At the time, Enrich made an exception for his expansive view: "But a victory for the cable news network would have raised questions — even among lawyers who represent the news media — about whether federal courts’ interpretations of the First Amendment made it impossible to hold anyone accountable for reckless and damaging lies."
Enrich discussed how Justice Thomas isn't fond of the case New York Times vs. Sullivan, which allows reporters to defame public figures, and can't be found guilty unless an obvious "malice" can be found. It's obvious -- if undiscussed -- that NPR was a vicious player in smearing Thomas as a sexual harasser, and then they repeated the exercise with Justice Brett Kavanaugh (his name never surfaced).
Perhaps if NPR was sued for defamation, taxpayers would end up with that bill, too.
Mosley and Enrich didn't touch on the most recent high-profile case, Zachary Young's successful defamation suit against CNN for reporting he was a "black market" operative (criminal) getting people out of war-torn Afghanistan. They didn't mention CNN and The Washington Post settling with teenager Nicholas Sandmann over their wildly inaccurate reporting on people screaming into Sandmann's face as he wore a MAGA hat in D.C. after the March for Life.
They did discuss ABC settling with Donald Trump over George Stephanopoulos claiming Trump was found "liable for rape." He said "most legal observers viewed as if not frivolous then lacking much merit," even if the Clinton bimbo-eruption specialist had murdered the truth. "There's no evidence, at least that I'm aware of or that had become public, that Stephanopoulos was lying or had acted with reckless disregard....almost every legal observer I speak to says that ABC had an extremely good chance of prevailing." But they caved!
Mosley made sure to mention -- for commercial purposes -- that Enrich also wrote other anti-Trump books with the titles Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, And An Epic Trail Of Destruction and Servants Of The Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, And The Corruption Of Justice. Naturally, Fresh Air also offered Enrich long interviews to promote those books when they came out -- actually, two long interviews on the Deutsche Bank reporting.
The Amazon page on this book leads with a blurb from leftist Trump-hater Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
"Authoritarian governments abroad have long used legal threats and lawsuits against journalists to cover up their disinformation, corruption, and violence. Now, as master investigative journalist David Enrich reveals, those tactics have arrived in America.”
NPR and Trump-hating journalists are the best of friends, and the warmest of allies. But Trump voters end up paying for these hour-long exercises in demonizing conservatives as creepy authoritarians.
