The Sky News broadcaster Erin Molan has been awarded $150,000 after winning a defamation suit against Daily Mail Australia over an article and two tweets that accused her of appearing to mock Polynesian names in a radio broadcast.
Molan told the federal court last year she did not think she was mocking Polynesian names when she said “hooka looka mooka hooka fooka” on 2GB in 2020.
She said the broadcast had nothing to do with mocking someone’s name and ethnicity.
Justice Robert Bromwich said each side had a “measure of success and a measure of failure”. The court found five of the eight imputations Molan alleged were wrongly conveyed by the Daily Mail, including that she “deliberately mocked the names of Pacific Islanders on air” and that her “inability to pronounce the names of Polynesian NRL players is so disrespectful and incompetent that she is unfit to be an NRL commentator”.
Bromwich found that Molan was not putting on a Polynesian or Pacific Islander accent on the radio program but rather putting on an accent of her colleague Ray Warren, who had stumbled over the names.
Molan’s evidence was that “it was a running joke on the show to attempt to do accents from all over the world” and the humour lay in the hosts laughing at their own “bad” accents.
“I conclude that Ms Molan was trying to put on two different accents: she was trying to put on an accent of Ray Warren as though it was him who was saying ‘hooka, looka, mooka, hooka, fooka’, rather than putting on a Polynesian or Pacific Islander accent; and putting on the accent of Chris Warren as saying ‘Dad’ in response, reflecting the interplay between the two which is inherent in the Warren story,” Bromwich said.
But Bromwich found that “the most serious pleaded imputation”, that Molan is a racist, was not conveyed.
“A substantial part of the hurt that Ms Molan deposed to, and evidence adduced at trial, was based upon her perception that she had been accused of being a racist, when this was not in fact conveyed,” he said.
“Dailymail.com needs to substantially improve the care that it takes, or face further and greater awards of damages,” he said. “Freedom of expression must be balanced with responsibility and basic professionalism which was sadly lacking in this case.”
Bromwich said Dailymail.com had found out about Molan saying the phrase, ran an initial story about it, and then ran with the reaction which that had engendered.
“They obtained an explanation for what had happened by reference to the Warren story but decided to persist,” he said.
“They went too far, were not careful enough, and made a number of material and defamatory errors which were not able to be justified, but did not go as far as Ms Molan’s case and arguments depict.”
The trial heard that Daily Mail Australia’s editor, Barclay Crawford, had sent an email to a journalist saying “Let’s rip into this sheila” before the website published an article about Molan.
“The reference in the email from Mr Crawford to Ms Zaczek, both at Dailymail.com, ‘Let’s rip into this sheila’ was a private, revealing, unsavoury and erroneous reflection of the extent of the error in overstating and erroneously characterising what Ms Molan had in fact done,” he said.
The news website argued a truth defence and denied running an illegitimate campaign against her. Bromwhich found that Dailymail.com had not established any basis for the application of the defence of honest opinion.
He ordered the Daily Mail to take the article down.
The managing director of Daily Mail Australia, Peter Holder, said the company was “very disappointed” and was considering an appeal.
Holder said the judge found Molan engaged in conduct that was likely to offend people because of their race or ethnic origin.
“It is also worth noting the court further held that while the Daily Mail article did not call Ms Molan a racist and that it was therefore not appropriate to make any determination on that issue, by reason of her ‘intemperate behaviour’ in prior broadcasts – including faking accents, and arguably advancing racial stereotypes – she was at ‘some peril’ of an adverse conclusion,” Holder said.
Molan had previously told the court she did not engage in casual racism.
Molan left Channel Nine last year to join Sky News and is a radio presenter on 2DayFM and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.
