Just days after Fox Corp. settled the Dominion defamation case for $787.5 million, the company’s executive chairman and CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, dropped the defamation suit against the independent Australian news site Oh dearwho linked his family to the attack on the US Capitol.
In August 2022, Murdoch launched defamation proceedings in a Sydney court against Oh dearthe owners of Private Media in response to an article published in June that named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the January 6 attack. The filing came a day after Private Media chairman Eric Beecher and editor-in-chief Peter Fray put their names on an advertisement in The New York Times Murdoch to sue them.
Murdoch’s lawyer John Churchill told the BBC that continuing the business would only be for the better Oh dear.
“Mr Murdoch remains convinced that the court will eventually find in his favor,” Churchill said in a statement to the BBC. Oh dear‘s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and to facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and increase their profits.
In a statement on TwitterPrivate Media’s Beecher and CEO Will Hayward said, “This is a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism. We stand by what we published last June and everything we laid out in court defense.
“We stand by our position that Lachlan Murdoch was guilty of 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 Dominion $1.17 billion to settle the case,” the statement said.
