For weeks, the media world has feasted on reams of overwhelming documents that trickled out of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News, accused of deliberately amplifying false allegations of voter fraud. opinion formers who privately destroy their own colleagues, Donald Trump‘s lawyers, and, in Tucker CarlsonThe former president’s case, himself, was a special kind of bacchanal for anyone interested in the goings-on of America’s top-rated cable news network, which insists Dominion “snatched distortions and misinformation into their PR.” campaign to smear Fox News and trample on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
Dominion v. Fox has become one of the biggest stories in the US, where Fox News is arguably the most influential force in media and politics, but the story is also a hot ticket in Australia, the homeland of Fox overlords Rupert And Lachlan Murdoch, where the Dominion case may star in a separate legal issue that has ensnared the Murdoch empire Down Under.
That would be Lachlan’s defamation suit against Crikey, a small, messy Melbourne-based digital publication and perpetual thorn in the side of the Murdochs. confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator,” who argued, “Nixon was famous as the ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in Watergate. The Murdochs and their horde of venomous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this crisis.”
If you’re looking for a comprehensive overview of this David v. Goliath-esque saga, give my October piece a spin. Otherwise, here are the basic bullet points: Lachlan claims that Crikey defeated him by suggesting that he personally played a part in the January 6 madness. Unlike in America, Australia’s defamation and defamation law slants in favor of the plaintiffs (there is no equivalent to the First Amendment in Oz), which seems to give Lachlan the upper hand. That said, Crikey is pursuing a relatively new “public interest” defense that has now been allowed by the Australian courts. Lachlan believes Crikey harbors a clickbait-driven “preoccupation” with him and his family, as a source told me earlier; Crikey believes Australia’s most powerful family should be held accountable, and that this case will be a “test … of freedom of public interest journalism in a courtroom”.
The last time I looked at the Crikey suit last fall was that it was headed for a trial to begin March 27 in Sydney, just before the expected start of the Dominion trial in Delaware in mid-April (and , appropriately, one day). after the season four premiere of Succession.) This week I learned that the two sides went to mediation towards the end of last year to try to reach a settlement, but no dice; things have only gotten uglier in the months since.
Lachlan has expanded his claims against Crikey – owned by a company called Private Media – to include Private Media’s chairman Eric Beecher and chef Will Hayward, accused of masterminding “a scheme to improperly use Murdoch’s complaint about the article to generate subscriptions to Crikey and thereby revenue for Private Media under the guise of defending public interest journalism.” As Lachlan’s lawyer argued without irony in a Journal 30 cur appearance: “We say that Beecher and Hayward are the relevant leading minds of Private Media and I should say, Your Honor, surprisingly. We cannot think of a single case in this country in which management interferes in the editorial decision-making of a media company. … It is … frankly beyond the understanding of a prosecutor that such editorial interference would have occurred. And, as far as my friends say, we should have known [earlier] to sue Mr. Beecher and Hayward … I can clearly say that it did not occur to us that the suits, the businessmen, the non-journalists, would have been part of that editorial decision-making.
Due to the extension of the case, the three-week trial has been pushed back to October, several months after Dominion’s day in court (assuming there isn’t an 11-hour settlement that keeps Dominion out of court.) Sources say Crikey. has been scrutinizing the Dominion documents as they come out. I’m told they believe the revelations bolster their defense of the public interest “quite considerably,” and that if Lachlan actually suffered any damage from Crikey’s op-ed, it would pale in comparison to the reputational damage that has resulted from the Dominion scandal. immbroglio. (No comment from Lachlan’s rep.)
It is therefore reasonable to assume that Crikey’s lawyers will try to bring the Dominion material into the case – which would further expand the scope of the trial – and that Lachlan may have to testify on it. to submit the Dominion material in Australia. I am told that they consider the Dominion case irrelevant because the lawsuit against Crikey pertains to what the author of the offending column and Crikey’s editors knew and believed when the column was published in June 2022: that is, that they knew nothing about the Dominion files. As someone logged into Lachlan’s camp put it, the Dominion angle is considered “a last-ditch rescue” in those circles. [Crikey’s] defense.” (No comment from Crikey either.)
If Crikey ends up leaning towards Dominion, Lachlan’s comments on the day of a “Stop the Steal” demonstration in November 2020 are sure to be interesting. “Newsboys should be careful how they report on this rally,” he wrote to Fox News Director Susan Scott. “The narrative should be that this is a huge celebration of the president.” Lachlan was also apparently the instigator of a pulse from the then-Fox anchor Leland Vittert, whose reporting Lachlan described as “smug and obnoxious”. And he warned Scott that a news ticker was “Way too cumbersome and long. And anti-Trump where possible.”
For Crikey’s purposes, that may not be enough to substantially characterize Lachlan as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the events leading up to Jan. 6. media executives – Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – who could have suppressed dangerous conspiracy over the election on their money-grabbing cable news network, but didn’t because the conspiracy was apparently good for ratings and, by extension, the bottom line.
Perhaps that’s why some observers of Lachlan v. Crikey believe a Dominion defense is meritorious. “These revelations further emphasize that the subject matter of the Crikey article … was a legitimate matter of public interest,” said a defamation expert at the university. from Sydney Law School told The Guardian Australia.Or, like Australian financial statement columnist Miriam Robin suggested this week, “What’s good for Fox News is good for Crikey.”
