If you think that Fox News spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election, and the direct relationship between that and the January 6 2021 insurrection, are now merely matters of historical interest, take a look at the current polling for Donald Trump against his strongest Republican challenger, Ron DeSantis.
Trump will almost certainly be his party’s candidate to face off against Joe Biden in 2024. And he is promising more aggression, more authoritarianism and more retribution if he wins. That’s bad news for US democracy, and for countries like Australia that rely on the US for their security (and we’ve stupidly doubled down on that to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars under the Albanese government).
Fox News will lie again to help Trump back into power, if it can. Not because (or merely because) Trump aligns with the reactionary values of the network, or of the Murdochs, but because it’s good business. The Murdochs long ago discovered that vast profits could be made from a media outlet that functioned as a political party, selling grievance, victimhood and conspiracy theories of demonic “liberal elites” to older white Americans. Trump is the avatar of the Murdoch business model, whatever personal feelings Rupert may have about him.
The costs of that model — polarisation, extremism, political violence and incompetence — are borne by everyone else. Or at least they were until COVID began killing Fox viewers who believed the anti-vaccination and “it’s all a hoax” tripe peddled by the network.
When I pointed out the role played by Fox News — and thus Rupert Murdoch and his family — in the January 6 insurrection, much of the information about the inner workings of Fox News had yet to emerge from the Dominion case. But it was hardly an act of prescience on my part. It was already a common topic of commentary in the US media. One of the United States’ best media commentators, Brian Stelter, had explained in detail the extent to which people within Fox News had decided that the prospect of losing extremist viewers due to the fact that the network was endorsing a reality-based analysis of the 2020 presidential election was too much.
My only original thought was to reflect the fact that we’d just had the 50th anniversary of Watergate in early June, and note how far Trump exceeded the previous historical exemplar of presidential misconduct, Richard Nixon — and how much the US media landscape had changed since the 1970s. Thus the now slightly even more famous phrase “unindicted co-conspirator”.
For a statement as unexceptionable as that, it came as a surprise when a personal lawyer for a member of the Murdoch family not even named in the piece contacted us in order to threaten litigation. Surprising for a media mogul with his own array of platforms and, he says, a deep commitment to free speech and a free press. And surprising for the lack of legal nous. Every lawyer that our then-editor-in-chief Peter Fray spoke to — and he spoke to a lot of them — concluded that Lachlan didn’t have a chance. After a good faith effort to resolve the matter, during which we took the article down, a lack of progress meant we had to fight.
Right from the outset, Fray was determined to do so, and he never resiled. And he was strongly backed by our CEO Will Hayward, our chairman Eric Beecher, and our colleagues at Private Media, despite the stakes involved. All media companies will at times respond to legal threats by copping it sweet. Even though you know you’re right, you decide it’s just not worth it. You roll over, issue an apology or take an article down, pay some money and move on.
But Fray was very clear that we were not going to roll over. This was Crikey’s core business of holding the powerful to account. That’s what Crikey, through all its iterations since Stephen Mayne established a gossipy shitsheet over 20 years ago, has always tried to do.
So we committed to back our journalism, to back the importance of a free press — and to hopefully take advantage of a new addition to our rotten defamation laws, the public interest defence. And to their everlasting credit, at no stage did Fray, Hayward or Beecher deviate from that. It’s a matter of enormous pride to me that I work for a company, and with colleagues, prepared to stand up for what’s important, even when it costs a very large amount of money and resources for a small company.
Perhaps Murdoch assumed we’d roll over. Instead we worked out a battle plan, called on our subscribers and took our case public. Facing an existential threat, we called for help from people who share our mission of holding the powerful to account. They responded in droves.
Murdoch’s legal team, and News Corp, later tried to portray this as part of a deliberate campaign all along to use Murdoch as a fundraising tool — as if the original article had been written to order as part of Operation Use Lachlan To Boost Subscriptions.
Well, memo for Mr Murdoch — and for every other reader. I’ve never written to direction at Crikey, and have never been asked to. I write what the evidence leads me to conclude, rightly or wrongly, even if it offends readers because I’m not supporting their favourite political party or cause. I intend to keep doing that. I’m too old and foul-tempered to do anything else.
But it’s disappointing that we won’t have the opportunity to pursue Murdoch in the witness box, nor to establish what would hopefully be a positive precedent of a successful use of the public interest defence. That remains untested.
Going into court, even alongside more experienced hands like Peter and Eric, would have been an unpleasant experience, and an expensive one for the company. I’m certainly relieved that I no longer face that. But I’ve been an armchair supporter of free speech and a free press for many years, so I couldn’t complain about finally being called into the fight.
And in the end, my stress would have been trivial compared to the price being paid by so many others — not just journalists — who have sought or continue to seek to hold to account the powerful. Annika Smethurst. Sam Clark and Dan Oakes at the ABC. Nick McKenzie at Nine. Brittany Higgins. Richard Boyle. David McBride. Bernard Collaery and Witness K. Most of all, Julian Assange. Australians who have paid, or continue to pay, a real and sometimes massive price for doing what’s right.
I’m also lucky we’ve had enormous support from readers, and from many in the wider community who gave, sometimes very generously, to our support fund. It made a huge difference not just financially but knowing that so many people were prepared to stand behind us.
To those who did so — thank you. You’ll never know just how much strength it gave us to know you were backing us.
Were you glad to see Lachlan Murdoch call off his case against Crikey? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
