Starting gun fired … Ticklish media baron sues independent news publisher … “Unindicted co-conspirator” in Trump’s crimes … No-one likes to be pushed around by a billionaire bully with an overblown sense of entitlement … News from The Defamatorium
With an ultra-conservative agenda for the US and Australia; his scorn of “elites”; his rants against Covid restrictions; and the war-like campaign against public broadcasting; the equivocation about global warming – he’s even more reactionary and polarising than his father.
Here he is, American accent and all, spruking his ideas about “Australian values” at the IPA’s Centre for the Australian Way of Life, telling his audience to “make sure we get all the rights back we thought we had”.
The article was about the evidence of former White House aid Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 House Select Committee, and in the process Keane made comparisons between presidents Trump and Nixon.
It ended with these two paragraphs:
“And Nixon didn’t have the support of the world’s most powerful media company, which continues – even in the face of mountains of evidence of Trump’s treachery and crimes – to peddle the lie of the stolen election and play down the insurrection Trump created.
If Trump ends up in the dock for a variety of crimes committed as president, as he should be, not all his co-conspirators will be there with him. Nixon was famously the ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in Watergate. The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”
It’s is not apparent what serious harm this would have caused Lachlan Murdoch, apart from some distress to his inflated ego, yet his lawyers sent a concerns notice – demanding the article be taken down and an apology from Crikey’s publisher, its editor Peter Fray and Bernard Keane.
The statement of claim is here.
These meanings are pitched very high and many of them can be expected to fall by the wayside as the case proceeds. They are likely to be met with the respondents’ numerous contextual imputations, and other defences.
Crikey’s lawyer Peter Bartlett at Minters responded to solicitor John Churchill for Murdoch, that much worse has been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times and the ABC about Fox News propagating the Big Lie – so get over it.
Further, each of the alleged imputations do not arise, at least to the hypothetical ordinary reasonable reader.
The lawyers’ letters are here, here and here.
The defence is now in the hands of Michael Bradley’s Marque Lawyers, which won the day on behalf of Jo Dyer and her case to remove Sue Chrysanthou SC from Christian Porter’s defamation action against the ABC.
The respondents kept piling it on.
Bernard Keane doubled down on August 22, with another piece in Crikey saying that Fox News “is an existential threat to US democracy”. And that its business model is to stroke and feed a “perverse sense of victimhood among its target audience of older white Americans …”
Crikey even took out a cheeky ad in the New York Times – an open letter to Lachlan Murdoch, pressing him to bring it on. The Nine metro papers squeamishly refused to publish the advertisement.
Here’s Crikey’s open letter to Lachlan Murdoch in the @nytimes today.
“We await your writ so that we can test this important issue of freedom of public interest journalism in a courtroom.”
Read it in full here 🔻https://t.co/0PUUNGf4Gx pic.twitter.com/ZbNdjCRzmS
— Crikey (@crikey_news) August 22, 2022
By then Lachlan’s statement of claim was ready to go, under the baton of defamation silk Sue Chrysanthou.
By any stretch of the imagination do you think Lachlan Murdoch would be reading Crikey, even while moving his lips? No. His ears and eyes are his go-to PR man, John Connolly.
It’s London to a brick that Connolly would have spotted Bernard Keane’s article and got the wheels moving with his old friend solicitor John Churchill. Churchill’s daughter used to work for Connolly.
In 2012 Connolly was suing Mark Textor over damaging tweets – but the case seems to have been settled.
Lachlan Murdoch is the co-chairman of News Corp, the CEO and executive chairman of Fox News – media outfits that defame, denigrate and destroy people as part of their daily fare.
Fox is defending the Smartmatic and Dominion voting machine cases on the grounds of comment on matters of public concern and exercising a right to free speech, while the company’s CEO is denying Crikey’s right to do the same thing.
Fox News had falsely claimed that the voting machines had been manipulated so as to deprive Donald Trump of victory at the 2020 president election.
Murdochs senior and junior are expected to appear at a deposition hearing this month as part of the applicants’ discovery process.
The discovery process in the case against Crikey is also likely to be tantalising as it burrows deep into the intestines of the Murdochs’ Trump propaganda machine, which Senator Elizabeth Warren has described as a mechanism that delivers “hate for profit”.
It is already well known that Tucker Carlson, the network’s star peddler of mendacity and conspiracies, had been undermining the work of the House January 6 Committee – a process that implicitly sugarcoated the mobs’ violent attempt to overturn the election result.
Fox News refused to air the early public hearings of the committee, instead relying on Carlson’s conspiracy theories that federal agents stoked the violence.
The New York Times wrote of Carlson’s Trumpist advocacy:
“He has aggressively defended the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 – an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president’s ‘deep state’ canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
And:
“[Carlson] forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox.”
The heir apparent even supported Carlson’s misinformation about Covid vaccines (they “kill people”) saying his star presenter was “brave”.
Given the astonishing list of Carlson’s lies, it is cringeworthy for Lachlan Murdoch to keep Tucker Carlson on his payroll while at the same time he claims to be a victim of falsehoods.
It wasn’t so much the case that Trump was feeding Fox News with his propaganda, rather it was the other way around. Fox News was feeding Trump all the best/worst lines.
CNN obtained leaked text messages between Fox News presenters and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, that reveal people like Sean Hannity pressed for directions on how to report voter turnouts and other elements of the election as it was underway.
Hannity and Meadows also debated the best strategy for Trump to challenge the election result – showing that Fox News was a complicit agent of the Trump White House.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said Lachlan Murdoch’s lawsuit is a “colossal error of judgment” and the interlocutory process will be akin to a public inquiry into the …
“… involvement of Fox News and the Murdochs in the whole catastrophe that was the latter days of the Trump presidency, and in particular, the propagation of the Big Lie that laid the foundation for the attempted coup on January 6.”
Quite possibly, the litigation could destroy whatever shreds of credibility Murdoch Minor has. His case might lie alongside Wilde v Queensberry, Porter v ABC, Streisand v Adelman – misconceived adventures in reputation repair.
It will be revealing to see how the heir goes under sustained cross-examination.
Then again, defamation trials in Australian courts rarely see victories for media defendants – especially in the plaintiffs’ playground of the Federal Court, regardless of the untested defence for public interest journalism.
People in Australia’s news publishing business are heartily sick of the relentless attacks from defamation complainants with dubious reputations. In most cases their applications to the courts would not get past first base in the US or Britain.
Maybe wiser heads in the Murdoch camp will prevail and some sort of tortured retreat will eventuate.
This undignified display of raw vanity and preciousness shows that Lachlan Murdoch doesn’t have the temperament to run a global media organisation and God knows what disasters lie ahead once of the old man shuffles off.
In the meantime, Crikey is not wasting a good defamation case. A campaign sees new subscriptions pouring in, and the till filling with fresh cash.