Everything You Need to Know Ahead of the Lachlan Murdoch Defamation Hearings

Over the last month, media executives and legal experts alike have watched on as the Australian news site, Crikey, challenged Fox News chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, into a defamation battle over an op-Ed that claimed the Murdochs contributed to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in Washington D.C.

On Friday, the case will have its first hearing in the Federal Court of Australia. Here’s what you need to know.

The article at the centre of the suit, which was first published on June 29, claimed links between the Murdoch family and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. It likened the media moguls’ role in the assault that day to the role former U.S. president, Richard Nixon, played in Watergate, and went on to claim the Murdochs contributed to the attacks seen in Washington D.C. that day. 

But, really, the whole suit boils down to the headline and one excerpt:

“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 story read. “The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”

The article’s headline was: “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator”.

The next day, Lachlan Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill, demanded Crikey pull the article down, and post an apology that would stay up for 14 days. Crikey replied to that with an offer to publish a clarifying statement, but stood firm on denying an apology. The site unpublished the story within minutes, before republishing the story on August 15.

Not long after that, Crikey published all of its correspondence with Murdoch’s lawyer over the dispute, before eventually taking out full-page ads in The New York Times and the Canberra Times, where they challenged Murdoch to sue them in an open letter. 

Murdoch obliged, and the suit will have its first case management hearing at 9a.m. on Friday, Australian Eastern Time. 

In a statement of claim filed to the court, Murdoch’s lawyer claimed the article carried at least 14 defamatory imputations, including that “Murdoch illegally conspired with Donald Trump to incite a mob with murderous intent to march on the Capitol”, and that he “illegally conspired with Donald Trump to break the laws of the Unites States of America in relation to the 2020 presidential election result”. 

Murdoch’s legal team has since claimed that the article caused, or is likely to cause, “serious harm to Murdoch’s reputation”, because of the article’s reach, and that there are “allegations of criminality in the article” which uses “sensational language” and compares Murdoch’s conduct to that of former U.S. president, Richard Nixon, who is “widely believed to have been a criminal conspirator in the Watergate scandal”. 

The publication only filed its defence with the court on Tuesday, but it isn’t yet available to the public. It’s expected, though, that the site’s legal team will argue the article doesn’t carry the defamatory imputations claimed by Murdoch.

On August 22, Eric Beecher, the chairman of Private Media—which owns Crikey, along with other small news sites—published an op-Ed on the site, announcing the company had “decided to lift the veil” and reveal the “abuse of power” at play in Australian media, afforded to major conglomerates by way of some of the strictest defamation laws in the world.

In that post, he said the company would publish all of its correspondence with Murdoch’s legal team in full, as part of a series called “The Lachlan Murdoch Letters”. He said that Crikey and News Corp, including Fox News, venture to “do the same thing—journalism”.

 “We are publishing these letters because we believe they expose the normally concealed world of Australian media power, in its most bullying form,” Beecher wrote.

“We didn’t start this senseless altercation with Lachlan Murdoch. We may not be as big, rich, powerful or important as him, but we have one common interest: we’re a news company that believes in publishing, not suppressing, public interest journalism,” he wrote.

“That’s why we’re looking forward to meeting Lachlan Murdoch in court, as he has foreshadowed, to test the defamation laws he and his editors constantly complain about.”

The lawsuit is expected by legal experts and pundits to become a test case for a new “public interest defence” introduced to defamation law in July throughout most states and territories across Australia, including in New South Wales, where the case will be heard.

The reforms arrived with a mixed reception from lawyers, and emerged as the most recent update to Australia’s strict defamation laws since 2005. 

The new reforms included a new “serious harm” test—which Murdoch is expected to satisfy, given Crikey’s reach—aimed at filtering out minor claims, along with the new “public interest” defence. The latter is aimed at giving publishers slightly more coverage when defending defamation claims.

David Rolph, a law professor at the University of Sydney, told The Sydney Morning Herald late last month that the new defence “focuses on the reasonable belief of the publisher as to whether the matter is of public interest”.

“[But] it’s not clear how courts will apply this new defence, and whether it will lead to different outcomes to earlier broad-based defences to defamation”.

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