Global Courant 2023-04-21 16:05:00
CANBERRA, Australia –
Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch dropped his defamation lawsuit against Australian news website Crikey on Friday, citing the settlement of the separate US case in which Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million for its lies related to the US presidential election of 2020.
The son of media magnate Rupert Murdoch filed the Crikey lawsuit last August, a day after executives at Crikey’s publisher put their names to an ad in The New York Times inviting Lachlan Murdoch to file a lawsuit to address the issue. of press freedom in court.
Murdoch’s lawsuit was against the publisher, Private Media, then-editor-in-chief Peter Fray, who was also the editor-in-chief of the website, and Crikey’s political editor, Bernard Keane.
Murdoch claimed he was slandered by Keane’s column on the U.S. Congressional Inquiry into the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol uprising, which Crikey published last June under the headlines: “Trump Is A Confirmed Traitor Unhinged. And Murdoch Is His Unindicted Fellow -conspirator.”
Murdoch’s attorney John Churchill said in a statement that he filed a notice of cessation with Federal Court on Friday.
“Crikey attempted to bring in thousands of pages of documents from a defamation lawsuit in another jurisdiction, which has now been settled,” the statement said, referring to the Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems announced Tuesday.
“Mr Murdoch remains confident that the court will ultimately rule in his favour, but he does not want to further allow Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and to facilitating a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and increase their profits,” said Churchill.
Private Media chief Will Hayward said his company, valued at less than AUD20 million ($13.4 million), sticks to Crikey’s description of the Murdochs as conspirators in the Capitol violence.
“The first statement was clearly intended with a degree of exaggeration,” Hayward said.
“It is very important that journalists in Australia have the space to express their views in good faith and that they do not have to fear billionaires litigating,” Hayward added.
Hayward and Private Media chairman Eric Beecher said in a joint statement that they are “proud to have exposed the hypocrisy and abuse of power of a media billionaire”.
“We stand by our position that Lachlan Murdoch was guilty of promoting the lie of the 2020 election result because he and his father had the power to stop the lies,” the statement said.
Crikey’s law firm Marque Lawyers said Lachlan Murdoch would be expected to pay all legal fees. “We and our customer are very satisfied,” the company tweeted.
The Crikey suit was set for a three-week hearing in Sydney from October 9.
Lachlan Murdoch had claimed that the Crikey article implied that he had illegally conspired with former President Donald Trump to “incite a mob with murderous intent to march on the Capitol” to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden.
In his defense, Crikey had argued that Lachlan Murdoch was “morally and ethically guilty” for the attack on the Capitol “because Fox News, under his control and management, promoted and disseminated Trump’s lie about the stolen election, despite Lachlan Murdoch knowing that it was false.”
The article did not name Lachlan Murdoch, but referred to “the Murdochs and their horde of venomous Fox News commentators”.
Sydney University libel expert David Rolph said the trial would have been the first test case of a new public interest defense to take effect across most of Australia in 2021.
The public interest defense is part of a series of reforms designed to make Australia’s libel laws “slightly less plaintiff-friendly”, Rolph said.
“That was an important defense put forward by Crikey here. This was going to be the first test case. We’ll have to wait for the next one,” Rolph said.
Rolph said one of the reasons Murdoch dropped the case was that Crikey was trying to expand his defense by including revelations from the Dominion trial.
The voting tech company had sued Fox for $1.6 billion, alleging its business was harmed and employees threatened when it was baselessly accused of manipulating its voting machines against Trump in the 2020 election.
The settlement followed the revelations of the mountain of evidence allegedly presented at the trial, which showed that many Fox executives and on-air talent disbelieved the allegations aired on some Fox shows, but they feared angering Trump fans to do with the truth.
