This is a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism. We stand by what we published last June, and everything we laid out in our defence to the court. The imputations drawn by Murdoch from that article were ridiculous.
We stand by our position that Lachlan Murdoch was culpable in promoting the lie of the 2020 election result because he, and his father, had the power to stop the lies. How do we know? Because Dominion sued Fox News for promoting the lies and Fox just paid A$1.17 billion to Dominion to settle the case.
Murdoch’s lawyer made the absurd suggestion, in his statement of defeat today, that his client “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”.
The fact is, Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case.
We want to take a moment to thank all of those who helped us on this journey — our loyal readers, the ordinary Australians who contributed to our GoFundMe, the Crikey editorial team who’ve worked under immense pressure, the wider staff who have put in colossal additional effort to keep the business going while all this has been going on, our legal team Marque Lawyers, our subscribers for their many notes of support, and real journalists across Australia who do the hard and tough work of holding power to account.
We are proud of our stand. 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.
