Lachlan Murdoch drops defamation case against Crikey

Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch has withdrawn his defamation case against Crikey. Murdoch’s lawyer John Churchill issued a statement this morning saying he had filed a notice of discontinuance in the matter.

Private Media issued a statement calling the outcome “a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism”.

“We stand by what we published last June,” the statement went on, calling the imputations drawn by Murdoch’s team “ridiculous”.

Churchill maintained that Murdoch “remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favour, however, he does not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits”.

Private Media said this was “absurd”.

“The fact is, Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case. We are proud to have exposed the hypocrisy and abuse of power of a media billionaire. This is a victory for free speech. We won.” 

The “case from another jurisdiction” referenced above is the defamation claim Fox News and Fox Corp were facing from Dominion Voting Systems. The case settled this week for US$787.5 million (just over a billion in Australian dollars), roughly half the damages Dominion was seeking.

Dominion argued it had been defamed by Fox’s amplification of the false theory that Dominion’s voting machines had played a part in voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. Upon the settlement, Fox issued a statement that tersely “acknowledged” the court’s rulings “finding certain claims about Dominion to be false”.

Lachlan Murdoch had initiated the proceedings in August last year in response to a June 29 2022 article about the public hearings into the US Capitol riots in January 2021.