To understand the negative effects of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court case that changed American libel laws, consider the example of David Enrich. An investigative reporter for The New York Times who participated in the paper’s smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, Enrich is the author of Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful (2025), a book that defends the press and, specifically, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Though Enrich has expressed regret for his own sloppy and malevolent reporting, it is protected by the very legal victories he celebrates in his own book.
The events of the case began in 1960 when The New York Times published a political advertisement critical of Southern opposition to desegregation that condemned the Montgomery police force but also contained inaccuracies. This led L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery police commissioner, to sue the Times for libel. Sullivan prevailed in the trial court and won the appeal in the Supreme Court of Alabama. The Times then appealed to the Supreme Court. In an opinion authored by Justice William Brennan, the Court reversed the lower-court decisions: to be guilty of libel, a media outlet had to be guilty of “actual malice.”
Insight into the case is provided by Carson Holloway, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, in his new book No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case Against New York Times v. Sullivan, published by Encounter Books. (Editor’s note: The New Criterion and Encounter Books are both published by Roger Kimball.) As Holloway describes it,
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