Crikey has always enjoyed picking through the flurry of takes that chip off a global story. The difference this week is … we’re a big part of that story.
Here’s a round-up of some of the takes that have trailed the news that Crikey invited Fox Corporation head Lachlan Murdoch to sue us for defamation, and that he, as it turns out, was happy to do so.
The forward sizzle
These are the early pieces — the revelation of a legal threat, featuring, as these pieces do, the terse, cagey comments, or perhaps no comment at all from the protagonists. The pick-up by a big international outlet that points out this is something to keep an eye on. This story, of course, provided a second round of forward sizzle once we’d publicly invited the lawsuit, as reporters were able to tweet their knowledge, ahead of the event, that Murdoch was going to oblige us.
The blow-up and the hot takes
The story blows up, and we get the first round of fully fleshed-out reports — first in the US, and then in Australia. Again, the developing nature of the story gives us two rounds of this, and things really blow up when Lachlan sues. In a lovely example of the Streisand effect, almost every publication cites the allegedly defamatory sentence in the original piece, bringing it to the attention of millions of people who would otherwise never have read it.
The contrarian takes
Given we’ve sometimes been known to put one or two of these out, I suppose we’re in no position to complain. The Age‘s Chip Le Grand frankly didn’t see what all the fuss was about — it was simply a clash of “towering egos and cold commercial interests”, nothing much at stake except who gets to claim “smartest guy in the room” privileges. The piece was merely an opinion, not proper journalism. He then made an oddly gratuitous point about how much money his employers have spent defending the action Ben Roberts-Smith brought against them over allegations of war crimes (“enough to buy Beecher’s entire media empire”). We’re preparing a concerns notice about this piece as we speak, Chip, you’d be happy to take it down, right? It’s not like you were doing “important, investigative journalism nor even, especially good journalism”. We also are deeply flattered that you think Crikey employs 40 journalists.
News Corp vet Andrew Bolt’s take — that he wouldn’t give a “far-left internet gossip magazine” like Crikey the platform and publicity that would inevitably follow the lawsuit — counts as contrarian in this context, we suppose.
The measured take
We must also note that Le Grand’s employers took a more nuanced approach in their editorial today:
For any Murdoch presiding over media organisations which at their worst insult, distort and aggressively attack opponents, to sue a small website for saying bad things about him is astonishing. The Murdoch media champion ‘free speech’ to the point of nausea, but not this time.
Crikey may occasionally feature “lazy and self-righteous” work (hey, I have a name, you know) but they back the principles at stake.
The fiery take
For reasons that by now must be fairly obvious to anyone who has read this far, the real fire has come in the US. Indeed, The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote — under the headline “Lachlan Murdoch’s pathetic attack on an Australian news outlet” — an account of the differing state of defamation law in Australia as opposed to the US, a place with explicit protections for freedom of speech and a culture and set of priorities that, for good and for ill, reflect that.
The meta, self-referential take
You’re reading it.
