This reporting appears in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
Fox Corp mogul Lachlan Murdoch may be using his immense powers to threaten Crikey, a decades-old Australian political news website, but the small outlet is not backing down at all.
The notoriously thin-skinned eldest Murdoch son fired off a series of legal threats to Crikey, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, over an absolutely scathing June 29 article, pointedly headlined: “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.”
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Politics editor Bernard Keane tied the Murdochs and their right-wing media empire to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, writing, “If Trump ends up in the dock for a variety of crimes committed as president, as he should be, not all his co-conspirators will be there with him. Nixon was famously the “unindicted co-conspirator” in Watergate. The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”
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While an onslaught of legal threats initially forced Crikey to remove the article, the defiant site put it online this weekend to “clarify” the Murdoch aggression.
“He is using the law to silence public debate,” Crikey’s top editor Peter Fray told Confider, while hinting the outlet is preparing its next legal move to defang Murdoch. “He is seeking to intimidate us and we are sick and tired of it.”
The Crikey ordeal went public just as it was reported that Lachlan is privately very critical of ex-president Donald Trump, who remains wildly popular with the Murdoch media empire’s core audience.
A rep for Murdoch declined to comment.
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