Finished on 7.14.25

Murder the Truth is a fascinating and distressing look at the history of, and especially the recent changes to, the landscape of American free speech and censorship. I don’t have much to say about it except that it’s concerning to see how this is playing out in our current political landscape. I highly recommend reading it.

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My favorite quotes:

“L. B. Sullivan’s efforts to intimidate the press had backfired to such a degree that his name would live on as an enduring symbol of American press freedoms.”

“These rules had made British courts a popular destination for what came to be known as ‘libel tourists’—Russian oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, Hollywood stars, and sundry rich individuals, often with only temerous connections to the UK, who flocked to London to file lawsuits against writers from around the world. So common were these suits that London earned the nickname ‘a town called sue.’”

“There were plentiful examples of employees acting callously. Daulerio, for example, had posted a video of a young woman having sex—or perhaps being raped, it was hard to tell—in the bathroom of a sports bar. When the woman’s friend begged to have the video removed, Daulerio initially refused, suggesting that the woman should just move on. (He later acquiesced.)” – I include this because I found it so, so wild the way society was at the time—which was incredibly recent! In what world could this be considered newsworthy? I can’t imagine publishing this or even considering publishing it, but it’s just how we thought about things in early-Internet days.

“In October 2015, he’d checked into a rehab facility in Florida for a couple of months. Now, in March 2015, he was in court. ‘It was like having reconstructive knee surgery and then joining a roller derby league,’ he said.”

“More than 2,500 newspapers in the United States have stopped publishing in the past two decades, a rate of about two per week. Most counties in the United States are no longer home to any daily papers, and many surviving outlets have been gutted by layoffs and other cost cutting. Seventy million Americans live in what researchers have dubbed ‘news deserts.’”

“Large news organizations generally have financial resources and formidable in-house legal departments. But they also have owners, and—regardless of whether they are traditional public-company shareholders, shadowy hedge funds, or billionaires looking to wield influence—owners tend to care about the bottom line.”

“Some of his headline-grabbing decisions—including a ruling that the federal death penalty was unconstitutional—had been swiftly overturned. ‘If you’re never reversed on appeal,’ he once explained, ‘you probably have taken too narrow a view of the law.’” -about Jed Rakoff