Steven Brill

Journalist · Author · Founder of Court TV and The American Lawyer · Co-Founder, NewsGuard · Founder, Yale Journalism Initiative

New York area, USA — Lecturer, Yale University Department of English

Yale University (Lecturer)

NewsGuard (Co-CEO)

Yale Journalism Initiative (Founder)

The American Lawyer (Founded)

Court TV / TruTV (Founded)

Biography

Steven Brill (born August 22, 1950) is an American journalist, author, lawyer, and serial entrepreneur whose career has spanned five decades and produced a string of influential media ventures, bestselling books, and sustained investigative journalism on the forces reshaping American society. He grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, graduated from Deerfield Academy, and earned a BA summa cum laude from Yale College in 1972 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1975—while simultaneously serving as an assistant to New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay, concentrating on law enforcement issues. These three strands — journalism, law, and civic urgency—have run together through everything he has built since.

Brill has won the National Magazine Award five times and been nominated twenty-three times, with wins spanning reporting, public interest, and feature writing across publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, TIME, Esquire, New York Magazine, and Harper's. He is the author of seven books, including three New York Times bestsellers. He has taught journalism at Yale since 2001, and together with his wife Cynthia—a Yale College graduate who serves as General Counsel of NewsGuard—endowed and founded the Yale Journalism Initiative in 2006, which has trained more than 100 Yale Journalism Scholars now working at major news organisations worldwide.

The American Lawyer and American Lawyer Media

Brill's first major entrepreneurial act was launching The American Lawyer in 1979, a monthly magazine covering the business of law firms and the legal profession in the United States and internationally. Before The American Lawyer, the American legal industry had almost no serious trade journalism scrutinising law firm finances, partnership structures, lawyer compensation, or the conduct of large corporate law practices. The magazine changed that permanently. Its annual Am Law 100 survey—ranking the 100 largest US law firms by gross revenue—became the most cited benchmarking tool in the industry and remains so today; the Am Law 200, Am Law Global 100, and related surveys followed. Early contributors included Jill Abramson, who later became executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Cramer, who later founded TheStreet.com. Over time, Brill expanded the operation into American Lawyer Media (ALM), a portfolio of around ten related legal publications. He also published his first book, The Teamsters, in October 1978—a reported investigation into the internal power structures and corruption within the Teamsters Union—which became a New York Times bestseller.

Court TV

In 1989 Brill conceived and began building what became Court TV, a cable network devoted to live coverage of criminal trials and legal proceedings. Two competing projects had been developing along similar lines—the American Trial Network from Time Warner and American Lawyer Media, and In Court from Cablevision and NBC — and Brill merged them into a single venture, presented to the National Cable Television Association in June 1990. Liberty Media joined the partnership in 1991, and Court TV launched on 1 July 1991. Its original anchors included Fred Graham, Cynthia McFadden, and Terry Moran. The network's profile rose dramatically during the Menendez brothers' first trial and reached its cultural peak during the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1995, which brought live gavel-to-gavel courtroom coverage to a mass American audience for the first time and permanently reshaped both legal culture and television news. Brill resigned from Court TV in 1997. The network was later rebranded as TruTV and is now part of the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio.

Brill's Content and Media Accountability Journalism

In June 1998, following his departure from Court TV, Brill launched Brill's Content—a monthly magazine devoted to media criticism, holding news organisations accountable for accuracy, fairness, and transparency. Its inaugural issue included a lengthy cover report criticising the mainstream press's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky story, alleging that independent counsel Ken Starr had illegally leaked grand jury material to journalists who then reported it without adequately disclosing its origins. The report generated significant controversy in media circles. Brill's Content ran until October 2001, when a joint venture with Primedia collapsed and publication was suspended. During the same period Brill launched Contentville, a content e-commerce site, and briefly took editorial control of Primedia's trade media properties; both wound down by the end of 2001.

Books

• The TeamstersSimon & Schuster, 1978 · New York Times bestseller · Reported investigation into Teamsters Union power and corruption

• After: How America Confronted the September 12 EraSimon & Schuster, 2003 · Narrative account of American homeland security, civil liberties, and resilience in the year after September 11, 2001

• Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's SchoolsSimon & Schuster, 2011 · Examination of the education reform debate, charter schools, and teacher union politics

• America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare SystemRandom House, 2015 · New York Times bestseller · Expanded from his 2013 TIME cover story "Bitter Pill," winner of the National Magazine Award for Public Service (2014) · Definitive account of how the Affordable Care Act was written, passed, implemented, and undermined

• Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse ItKnopf, 2018 · New York Times bestseller within six days of publication · Sweeping diagnosis of American institutional decline across government, finance, law, media, and public health, and profiles of individuals working to reverse it

• The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World — and What We Can Do About ItKnopf, 2024 · Documents the forces behind the collapse of shared factual reality—social media's engagement-maximising architecture, programmatic advertising's inadvertent funding of disinformation, the exploitation of cynicism by demagogues — and proposes transparency-based remedies including news reliability ratings

NewsGuard and the Reliability Rating Model

In March 2018, Brill and Gordon Crovitz—former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and Brill's co-founder at Journalism Online — launched NewsGuard Technologies, a for-profit company that deploys trained journalists to rate the reliability and credibility of news and information websites on a 0-to-100 scale using nine criteria of journalistic practice. Each rated site receives a "Nutrition Label"—a detailed written report explaining the rating, disclosing the site's ownership and financing, and identifying who on the NewsGuard team worked on the assessment, with their bios and contact information. Sites are always contacted for comment before any negative assessment is published. The intent is to provide an accountability layer that algorithms cannot: journalists read and assess content, apply consistent standards, and sign their names to their conclusions.

Brill describes himself as a moderate Democrat and Crovitz as a "rabid conservative"—a pairing designed to demonstrate the model's nonpartisanship. NewsGuard rates Fox News as slightly more reliable than MSNBC, and rates left-leaning sites such as the Daily Kos lower than many conservative outlets. The company has sought to license its ratings to social media platforms including Meta and Google, with mixed results; it has also sold data services to defense and intelligence agencies, and most recently has expanded into NewsGuard for AI—providing structured data to train generative AI models to avoid amplifying misinformation. As of 2024, NewsGuard has rated more than 10,000 news and information websites. The venture has attracted criticism from some conservatives who consider it a censorship tool, and from some liberals who consider its neutrality framework inadequate to the asymmetry of disinformation on different parts of the political spectrum. Brill addresses both sets of critics at length in The Death of Truth.

Yale Journalism Initiative and Current Activities

Brill began teaching an advanced journalism seminar at Yale in 2001 and has taught there continuously since. In 2006, he and Cynthia Brill endowed the Yale Journalism Initiative, which recruits undergraduates with strong writing and analytical abilities into a structured programme of journalism training, mentorship, and practicum work that culminates in the Yale Journalism Scholar credential. More than 100 scholars have graduated from the initiative and are now working at major national and international news organisations; the alumni network actively supports newly graduating scholars entering the field. Brill serves as seminar leader and outside coordinator of the programme and is listed as a full/part-time lecturer in Yale's Department of English. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at Yale Law School. He continues as co-CEO of NewsGuard alongside Gordon Crovitz, publishes the NewsGuard Reality Check newsletter, and remains a frequent commentator on media accountability, the business of journalism, and the politics of disinformation.

Steven Brill
New York area, USA

Teaching: Lecturer, Department of English, Yale University; Adjunct Professor, Yale Law School

Current role: Co-CEO and Co-Founder, NewsGuard Technologies (with Gordon Crovitz)

Founded: Yale Journalism Initiative (2006, with Cynthia Brill) · The American Lawyer (1979) · Court TV / TruTV (1991) · Brill's Content (1998) · Journalism Online / Press+ (2009, sold 2011)

Yale faculty page: english.yale.edu/people/full-part-time-lecturers/steven-brill

NewsGuard: newsguardtech.com  |  Reality Check newsletter: newsguardrealitycheck.com

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