The Washington Post
A couple dozen people gathered recently in an elegant Kalorama backyard to fête The Death of Truth, Steven Brill’s new book about how bad information on the internet is polarizing the world.

Truth was not dead in this backyard, here among the servers filling wine glasses and restocking the platter of mini lobster rolls. “I trust institutions,” the veteran journalist told the typical Washington book party crowd of journalists, political staffers, communications consultants. “This isn’t a problem for the people who are assembled here.”

The issue was other people. Brill had in mind people like Dustin Thompson, a Columbus, Ohio, man who grew up middle class, graduated from Ohio State, and worked in the pest control industry until he lost his job during the pandemic, at which point he spent a lot of time at home, online.

“Long story short,” Brill told his book party guests, “by January 6, he was in the Capitol wearing a bulletproof vest and wielding a coatrack as a weapon.”

Brill, 73, entered the journalism industry in its energized post-Watergate years and emerged as a serial entrepreneur. He founded the American Lawyer magazine in 1979 and Court TV a decade later, which treated law not merely as a profession but as a business and as entertainment. In the late 1990s, Brill made media itself the focus for his next start-up, founding Brill’s Content, a glossy monthly devoted to media analysis and criticism, its debut issue attempting to unmask the secret sources behind Washington coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

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