It’s a story that the mainstream media ignored. It was a liberal reporter at The New York Times who was apologizing to me, a conservative. If it were the other way around—a conservative reporter apologizing to a liberal he’d maligned—the media would never stop talking about it. Brian Stelter would get the vapors.
In January I published an article revealing that David Enrich expressed regrets to me about what he wrote about Brett Kavanaugh and me in 2018. Enrich, like the rest of the media tried to destroy me and Kavanaugh, who was a friend of mine in high school, in order to prevent Kavanaugh from becoming a SCOTUS justice. Enrich and the Times used everything, including our high school yearbook, to try and ruin us.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage,” Enrich wrote to me last December, “and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”
When I asked Enrich to elaborate on what he’d do differently, he said, “This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays. Sorry.”
My story did get coverage on Fox. And there was a strong reaction on social media. However, I’m hoping that’s only the first part. Enrich needs to come fully clean. He needs to name the names of the people who were involved in his abysmal coverage. Enrich has a new book coming out called Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. It’s a defense of the media, which Enrich believes is under assault by Donald Trump.
The holidays are over. It’s time for that longer conversation Enrich promised me. Enrich will soon be visible promoting his book. Not surprisingly, Murder the Truth argues that journalists should be able to write whatever they want about anybody without repercussions. They should be able to do so because of the broad protections the press has enjoyed since 1964 and the Times vs Sullivan case which protected the media from defamation suits against public figures.
I’m the son of a man who was a journalist his entire life, spending his last 30 years at National Geographic. I grew up respecting and even loving journalists. Yet the media’s now out of control, as evidenced by the fact that CNN, MSNBC and ABC have all recently settled multi-million dollar defamation suits. These settlements are troubling to Enrich. In short, he’s defending the behavior that he perpetrated—and apologized for.
In Murder the Truth, Enrich explores the 1974 case Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc. The Supreme Court further broadened the ever-expanding group who could be maligned by the media to include “limited purpose public figures.” Enrich describes limited purpose public figures: “These were people who weren’t necessarily famous but had injected themselves into a public controversy by, for example, becoming a prominent advocate for or against abortion rights. The five-to-four decision even acknowledged that in rare cases, someone might fall under this umbrella involuntarily. (Think of an air traffic controller on duty when a plane crashed.) The logic was the same: people needed to be able to investigate and write about those in the public sphere, even if they accidentally got a fact wrong. This was hardly the end of libel.”
This becoming a public figure “involuntarily” justified, to the media, the madness that I faced in 2018. When reporters were going through my car, hounding my elderly mother and visiting high school girlfriends, I tried to protest that I wasn’t a public figure and running for anything. I was told I’d become public figure—because the media had made me one. My “limited purpose” was to help destroy my high school friend.
David Enrich apologized to me for his reckless and unconscionable reporting on and Brett Kavanaugh and me. He promised further conversation after the holidays. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.” Those were the last words he wrote to me.