Lawyers for Lachlan Murdoch are arguing a new public interest defence isn’t applicable for Crikey in the media mogul’s defamation case against the online publication.
Today we’re publishing a series of lengthy legal demands sent to us over the past two months by Lachlan Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of News Corp and Fox Corporation, as well as our lawyers’ replies to those demands.
In separate defamation suits in the U.S. and Australia, the owners of Fox News contradict themselves by trying to avoid the punishment they seek to inflict on others.Peter MaassPeter MaassAugust 30 2022, 12:14 a.m.
Lachlan Murdoch’s history in Australia doesn’t seem to read well. First Onetel and now Points Bet all business blunders. This Philosophy major doesn’t appear to have the business skills of his father. He knows how to spend but not make money. But then Rupert was driven out of the UK, threatened with jail, and the loss of license in the UK, only to be saved by the Tories with whom he had an arrangement of mutual benefit. He fled to America, the land of Trump, became an American, and flourished when he appointed Roger Ailes to head up Fox News.
Yes,the Murdochs have made money but it seems unclear that it was entirely their doing. Corporate raiders of the assets of others have served them well. However, Australia hasn’t been as kind to their bottom line despite Newscorp’s quid pro quo arrangements with the LNP to ransack the ABC, the IPA, and multinational non tax paying corporate interests. The Murdochs have never really had any regard for journalism, news and information or the Australian people.
The rationale for News is that digital betting would supplement the challenged earnings its traditional media assets have experienced in Australia over time.
Even Roger Ailes didn’t take Fox News to the extremes the Murdoch’s have.
“American Nationalist,” The New York Times’ three-part investigation of the rise of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, tells the story of how the star host, with the full support of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and the network’s other top executives, created “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.”
Fox’s brass, as reporter Nick Confessore details, has ignored any number of warning signs and protests from inside and outside the network that Carlson’s white nationalist rants were dangerous, due to their appreciation for his ratings and affinity with his message.
The takeaway for those involved with Fox – staff, guests, and companies that buy ads on the network – should be clear: You are supporting a company that prioritizes the promotion of white nationalism in the U.S.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, the son of international media magnate Rupert Murdoch, defended his company’s flagship cable news network in a rare interview Wednesday with Insider, calling Fox News’ primetime host Tucker Carlson “brave” for espousing the nativist “replacement theory” and defending the provocateur’s false statements on COVID-19 vaccines. “Obviously our opinion is center-right,” Lachlan said at one point of Fox News, his company’s profit center. But despite the network’s increasingly fevered pitch on controversial culture war issues, he laid the blame for our current age of partisan rancor at the feet of social media companies, which “algorithmically drives people into echo chambers.”
Without its legacy film and television business, Fox Corp’s most-high-profile division is Fox News, which is in a symbiotic relationship with the president of the United States. That relationship is already challenging Lachlan to deal with what one Hollywood executive called “the elephant in the room” for Fox – the toxic identity of Fox News in a mostly liberal entertainment industry. On the other side of the political spectrum, several Fox News staffers said they are distrustful of Lachlan’s devotion to the cable news channel, and some call Lachlan “Fredo” behind his back, an unkind reference to a weak-willed son in “The Godfather.” The opinionated, conservative faction of the company that supports Trump is already testing his authority.
Trump became president, giving Rupert unprecedented access to a sitting US president – a relationship he has long coveted. The two men talk weekly, according to people close to them, and sometimes more often than that.
Lachlan doesn’t like to talk to the politicians. Rupert, however, has always has been attuned to political realities.
This is what Murdoch has always been about THE ART OF THE DEAL something Trump could never finese. (ODT)
“Rupert understood all along that governments care about media and that they meddle in it, and they have rules and you have to have a rapprochement to be successful,” said Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman in the Clinton administration.
The Murdochs agreed to the Disney offer as the Justice Department was fighting AT&T’s $US85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. In contrast to the hostility Trump displayed toward that deal, Trump spoke to Rupert the day the Fox deal with Disney was announced and “congratulated him,” according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
(In another sign of the Murdochs and Trumps having close ties: When Ivanka Trump joined the White House, she relinquished her role as trustee of the fortune of Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest children.)
“It’s Lachlan versus the president,” said the 21st Century Fox film executive. “Who do you think is going to win that?”
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