Lachlan Murdoch sends legal threat to Crikey over January 6 article
Lachlan Murdoch has threatened online news website Crikey with legal action over an article that suggested he and his media mogul father Rupert Murdoch were responsible for the riots at the US Capitol in January.
The article, written by Bernard Keane and published in June, made comparisons between the Murdoch family and President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal.
Titled “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor and Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator”, it alleged Lachlan and Rupert, through their control of right-wing cable TV network Fox News, were to blame for the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which attempted to prevent the congressional certification of then President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Multiple media sources, who requested anonymity to speak freely on the matter, said Lachlan Murdoch has issued a concerns notice and fired off multiple legal letters to Crikey since June. The article has already been taken down from the website and various social media platforms, but lawyers are continuing to negotiate.
Murdoch is demanding an apology for the claims, which he says are defamatory. A spokesperson for Murdoch was unavailable for comment. Crikey editor-in-chief Peter Fray declined to comment.
Allegations of involvement in the January 6 riots are a sore point for the Murdoch family. While high-profile commentators on Fox New have been blamed for encouraging Trump supporters, media outlets in the US including The New York Times have published articles about Lachlan Murdoch’s snubs of former President Donald Trump and reports published in recent months say he is scathing of the January attack.
In July, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal (both owned by the Murdoch family) published blistering editorials about Trump’s actions concerning the January 6 riot, where at least seven people had lost their lives.
Last December, the select committee investigating the riot revealed that Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade urged a senior Trump aide to get the president to act against the riot.
Meanwhile, a US Congressional Hearing last month heard that Trump was watching live footage of the riot on Fox News as it happened, ignoring pleas from his family and advisors to step in.
Rupert Murdoch, who is not an Australian citizen, is widely known not to sue for defamation. However, Lachlan Murdoch is more litigious and this is not the first time he has demanded an apology from Crikey.
In April last year Crikey deleted an article by its founder Stephen Mayne, which made claims about Murdoch’s tenure as a board member of Channel Ten. Crikey’s editor-in-chief, Peter Fray, said at the time Mayne had made a series of mistakes in the article and had agreed to “keep the current apology on the homepage for 14 days”.
It cost Crikey $14,000 in legal costs, and was settled between the two parties. Crikey was also forced to apologise in September 2020 for likening Murdoch to an organised crime figure.
In 2012, Lachlan Murdoch’s settled a defamation case against Fairfax Media, the previous publisher of this masthead, over an article that ran in The Age’s CBD column about his alleged use of News Corp’s corporate jet. He donated the $50,000 settlement to charity.
Murdoch, who is the CEO of Fox Corp and a non-executive chairman of News Corporation, is facing two major lawsuits in the US from voting machine companies that are seeking billions of dollars in damages over claims that Fox News’ lies about the 2020 election destroyed their businesses.
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