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 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.

- Christiane, thanks.

David Enrich, thanks so much for joining us.

You wrote a book recently called "Murder the Truth, Fear the First Amendment and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful."

You know, at the core of your book is a Supreme Court case that most of our audience are probably not familiar with, most Americans aren't familiar with.

1964's New York Times versus Sullivan encapsulate that.

Why is it such an important case?

- In a nutshell, it established that if you're a powerful person, an elected official, a billionaire, someone like that, in order to successfully sue someone for defamation, you need to not only prove that you were defamed, so that someone got a fact wrong about you and that that hurt your reputation, you need to go further than that.

You also need to prove that whoever spoke or wrote that defamatory falsehood did so either knowing that what they were saying was false, so in other words, lying, or they did it with reckless disregard for the truth.

And the Supreme Court created that high bar knowing that it was really high and it would be hard to overcome.

And the reason was that they wanted journalists and just members of the public in general to have the breathing room to know that they could criticize or interrogate or scrutinize powerful people in society without worrying that if they made an innocent mistake, a good faith error, that that could subject them to basically bottomless, endless liability.

And so the Supreme Court decision in New York Times versus Sullivan really opened up this golden age of investigative journalism because it allowed people, reporters and others, to pursue ambitious targets and really try to uncover wrongdoing and hold people accountable without worrying that an innocent slip-up could cause terrible financial damage for them.

- 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 who are 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?

- Well, it became really important because Hulk Hogan won this lawsuit, basically bankrupted Gawker.

And on its face, that was, you know, you could understand why Hulk Hogan had sued Gawker.

Gawker had published this sex tape of Hulk Hogan and made it his privacy.

Easy to understand that.

It turned out after the verdict that Peter Thiel had been in the background financing this, and he wasn't financing it because he liked Hulk Hogan.

He was financing it because he had decided years earlier that he wanted to destroy Gawker because he was very unhappy with the website's coverage of him personally and of Silicon Valley in general.

And the fact that Thiel had masterminded and bankrolled this plot sent real shockwaves through the media world because it showed that one billionaire with some patience and creativity, he was a playbook for them to basically kneecap news organizations whose views or his journalism they didn't like.

And I think for journalists, that was a very scary prospect, that one angry man could basically destroy you.

I think on the other hand, people who like to file such lawsuits and don't like the way they're covered in the media, this was a real moment of celebration.

And people like Donald Trump saw this verdict and saw the outcome of it.

And it was just, I think, really inspiring to them.

- Now, is there this sort of reaction that, well, not just because Peter Thiel did it, but let me go ahead and sue the institution?

Because if it's an institution like the New York Times, sure, they've got a fleet of lawyers and they can defend themselves.

But if it's a smaller publication or just a single writer, they probably don't have the resources.

- Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.

And that's one of the real things I spent a lot of time tracking as I reported and wrote this book was that, I sit at the New York Times, I used to work at the Wall Street Journal.

Those are big news outlets that have the resources and kind of the wherewithal to defend themselves, not only from lawsuits, but from legal threats that journalists often receive before they publish a big story.

What I found though, is that these threats and lawsuits are being used increasingly against smaller news organizations and independent journalists that have a lot less resources to fight back with.

And the impact of that, and first of all, it's a deliberate effort I found often by rich and powerful people at either the national or sometimes the local level as well, to just shut down critical speech about them and including journalism, but by no means limited to journalism.

This is a tactic used against activists, just community members, things like that as well.

And it's not just politicians, don't get us big companies as well.

And the tactics are often effective and they lead journalists, news organizations, lawyers, to really start pulling punches because they are faced with a really difficult choice between standing up to these legal threats or these lawsuits, which often are not, do not have a firm basis in the law, but standing up to them can imperil you financially.

And on the other hand, it's often easier and kind of financially rational, I think, to just pick a less controversial and a less litigious target.

But the result of that is often that you are essentially engaging in self-censorship.

That means that important stories aren't covered, wrongdoing doesn't get exposed, people aren't held to account for their actions.

And that's the role that journalism is supposed to play in this society going back hundreds of years to the formation of this country.

And so I think it's a really potentially severe problem.

- What has happened in this second Trump administration now?

There seems to be tactically a very different approach that the administration is taking now versus the first time around.

- Yeah, I mean, the first administration now looks like a bit of a warm-up act for what we're seeing in the second administration.

And Trump's rhetoric has gotten increasingly incendiary, but I think more important than that, his actions speak louder than his words, and his actions are really profound in a lot of ways.

And it's a whole range of stuff.

I mean, he's suing news organizations, he is threatening news organizations, that's kind of the plain vanilla stuff.

I mean, he is kicking news outlets out of the White House, restricting how they can cover things because he does not like their choice of language or the way they've written about things.

The White House is asserting control over which news organizations and which journalists can travel with the president, can have access to the Oval Office.

They have gutted, the administration has gutted longstanding news organizations like Voice of America.

There's obviously been a widespread effort, not just in the White House, but in Congress as well, to strip organizations like PBS and NPR and their member stations of funding.

And these are all things that I think have been on, or 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, in 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.

And they're actually getting what they want, not just in terms of the actions they're taking, but legislatively as well.

So I think there's a lot of stuff going on here, but it's clear there's a lot more substantive and I think from a media standpoint, potentially dangerous than what we saw the first time around.

- Just a point of information and full disclosure, the conversation that our audience is watching right now is produced by a public media station.

So we are in ways part of this story.

You wrote a fascinating piece recently, not just about politics and the press, but really just about corporations as well.

You focused in on UnitedHealthcare.

Tell our audience a little bit about kind of the tactics that UnitedHealthcare is using now to basically quash public dissent.

- Yeah, well, UnitedHealth is one of the, I would say most controversial companies in the country right now.

It's under, facing enormous criticism for many of its business practices.

People are really angry at them.

And it have been going to platforms like TikTok and YouTube and to criticize the company.

And since the murder of one of their top executives last December, UnitedHealth has gotten much more aggressive in fighting back against this.

And they've done things like send, basically threatened to sue someone, a doctor who posted a video on TikTok to criticize the company.

They've gone to streaming platforms like Amazon Prime and Vimeo and pushed those platforms to remove material that was critical of the company.

They've gone after local journalists and people working at community news organizations.

And the list kind of goes on here.

And I think one of the things, and to some extent these tactics are indeed work and there are platforms like Prime Video and Vimeo removed things at the request of UnitedHealth.

And it leads to a real kind of rising tide of self-censorship that insulates not just politicians, but also big powerful companies like UnitedHealth from criticism and from scrutiny at the exact moment when that scrutiny and accountability I think is most needed.

- So, for the record, a spokesperson for UnitedHealth in your story was quoted saying, "The truth matters.

And there's a big difference between criticism and irresponsibly omitting facts and context.

When others get it wrong, we have an obligation to our customers, employees and other stakeholders to correct the record, including by making our case in court when necessary."

I wanna ask specifically about, say for example, the Walt Disney Company that settled a lawsuit against the Trump administration had brought against ABC News.

And now the Paramount Corporation that settled in a different way for a kind of a different reason.

Why are those important?

Because technically, you could look as a bean counter and say, this is just part of doing business.

I'm just doing a cost benefit analysis.

I don't want the administration on my back.

So what if I just write a $50 million check to a presidential library versus saying I'm gonna stand up for press freedoms?

- Well, look, I mean, this is a feature for better or for worse of having major companies owning news organizations.

And I mean, I think it is to a certain extent that the encounters making the decision here for a company like Disney that has tens of billions of hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, cutting a check for $15 million.

So a lawsuit against ABC News goes away is quite possibly a rational thing to do.

And same for Paramount, which has a multi-billion dollar merger pending that needs federal approval.

I think the problem is that it sets a precedent that shows journalists that their parent companies do not have their back.

And it sends a message to not only to Trump and his administration, but any other rich and powerful person anywhere in the world or at least anywhere in the country that it's open season on journalists and that these attacks can work and that they are working.

And it encourages people to further weaponize the legal system to crack down on companies, news organizations and journalists whose coverage is critical or unfavorable.

And again, I think the most important thing here is that the lawsuits that Trump has been filing against ABC, against CBS, against the Des Moines Register, against the Wall Street Journal most recently, they appear to lack legal merit based on the substance of the complaints and the underpinning interpretation of the law.

And yet you're seeing these companies like Disney and like Paramount basically bending a knee to Trump just to make this stuff go away.

And that's exactly what he wants.

And when I talk to people in his camp about this, they celebrate these victories and say very openly, I think, that this is emboldening them and that the tactics are working and that they're going to keep using this tactics going forward.

- Most recently, Paramount, the parent company that owns CBS has the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

They announced that they were gonna finish the Late Show with a multi-decade long brand.

Their rationale for it is that just financially it doesn't make sense anymore.

And I wonder, now there's a lot of speculation, wondering how much of this is business versus how much of this is silencing a critic in Stephen Colbert, especially days after he criticized the very bargain that Paramount struck with the government.

- 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.

And the way I look at it is that CBS and Paramount have resolved the lawsuit that Trump filed by paying off Trump, but there's another party to this and they still need to get the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, to approve this multi-billion dollar deal and it's pending.

And so sending a signal to the Trump administration that you are going to shape programming in a way that will be less objectionable to the White House, that does send a signal to the White House that you're playing ball.

And certainly Trump has stated publicly since the show was canceled that he applauds this and he takes credit for it.

Now, I don't know if that's actually what happened here, but that's certainly the way the White House seems to be interpreting it.

- Yeah, there is a lawsuit that has now been filed against Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion against the Wall Street Journal for a story that they published just last week about Jeffrey Epstein and whether or not the president had written this kind of tawdry birthday note, et cetera.

But my question to you is what happens inside a newsroom, considering you've worked at both the Journal and the Times now, when there is a lawsuit like this, at least at a place where you do have a fleet of in-house and outside counsel that can help defend your rights?

- Well, I mean, what happens is that you, your lawyers then basically start circling the wagons and trying to figure out what is happening, what documents need to be preserved, who might need to be deposed in the future.

And on the surface, it's like not a problem because these lawsuits tend to lack merit.

It's clear in the Journal's case that assuming they did not make up this letter that Trump supposedly wrote to Epstein, that they're on pretty solid legal ground because the truth is always a defense against defamation claims.

But look, being sued by anyone, and much less the president of the United States, is a scary prospect.

And I don't know how the reporters at the Journal are feeling, but I can tell you how I've felt when I've been sued over much lesser things.

And it is a, it's a terrible feeling.

It's scary and it makes you question what you should be reporting on in the future, even if you know intellectually and in your head that this is, that you're on safe ground.

And so, and I think that is one of the intensive lawsuits like this, is to get journalists thinking twice about whether they really wanna speak critically about Trump or his people or his allies, because that might result in legal action, which has a potential to drag on for years.

And even if you work for a big institution like the Wall Street Journal, that's a clown that's going to be hanging over your head and causing you to lose sleep at night.

- You know, one of the things that I found interesting about your book is that it's as much a story about this court case and the kind of legal battles as it just is about just money and power and the way that power is exerted in so many different ways.

We're not, you know, we're not necessarily seeing the through line.

Help our audience understand how kind of power is transacted and why it's so important in this, this tussle.

- Well, look, I mean, we right now have a strong First Amendment.

We have precedents that have interpreted the First Amendment in a very robust way that offers a lot of protection.

But there are a lot of people with a lot of money and power that are on this very well-coordinated campaign to roll back a lot of those protections.

And that's an expensive proposition and it requires a lot of time and energy and money.

And what I found that's happening and really all over the country is that there are a lot of lawyers, activists, academics, politicians who are working in lockstep often through well-financed organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society to really not only change public opinion, but change the opinion of the few people that really have the power to alter the law, which are the justices of the United States Supreme Court.

And the goal here is in large part to roll back New York Times versus Sullivan so that it becomes not only easier for powerful people to sue news organizations and members of the public, but also so that the kind of the risk-taking calculus inside a news organization or even a member of the public changes and that it becomes riskier and potentially much more expensive to speak critically or even to scrutinize or investigate powerful people and institutions.

And that creates, that can further tilt the playing field in favor of powerful people in organizations and companies and away from those who are trying in their professional lives or even in their personal lives trying to speak up what they speak to power.

And I think that is, that's a shift that's been underway for a long time, but it's definitely been accelerating in the past several years.

- New York Times journalist and author of the book "Murder, The Truth."

David Enrich, thanks so much for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.