Remember Crikey, the independent news site that so upset Lachlan Murdoch by calling him Trump’s “unindicted co-conspirator” of Jan. 6 that he sued the site for libel? It turns out that Murdoch is the one doing the paying.

An August 26, 2022 column in The Guardian explained what got under Lachlan Murdoch's apparently very thin skin:

The Crikey article written in June by journalist Bernard Keane has long been forgotten by its readers, which is not to say that it wasn’t well crafted. It discussed the evidence of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the January 6 House select committee, and in the process Keane made comparisons between presidents Trump and Nixon.

It ended with this paragraph: “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.”

The suit was justifiably ridiculed at the time. I daresay the passage is especially relevant now with the two indictments against Donald Trump for election interference and with the subsequent revelations about Fox News’ election deceit from the Dominion defamation case. But I digress.

Murdoch dropped the defamation case against Crikey in April, two days after Fox settled the Dominion case for $787.5 million and after Crikey had obtained and planned to use in its own case thousands of pages of the embarrassing-to-Fox evidence that had been made public in the Dominion case, The New York Times reported at the time. Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill was quoted as saying, “Mr. Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favor; 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.”

Yesterday, we learned that it's Lachlan Murdoch who's paying up. From an August 22, 2023 article in The New York Times:

Lachlan Murdoch has paid $840,000 in legal costs to a small Australian publisher after he dropped a defamation lawsuit accusing the company of linking his family to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

Mr. Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill, said in a statement that Mr. Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, said the payment covered all of the costs that Private Media, the publisher of the news website Crikey, faced because of the libel case he had brought against the company. The amount equates to about 1.3 million in Australian dollars.

…

Will Hayward, the chief executive of Private Media, wrote in an article published on Crikey that money the company had raised through crowdfunding to help pay for the legal costs — about $378,000, or about 588,000 in Australian dollars — would be donated to the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, an Australian nonprofit. That donation was a condition of the agreement with Mr. Murdoch.

Crikey does not seem a bit cowed. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the same day Murdoch’s payment was reported, Crikey revealed “it has launched a new editorial series called The Murdoch Century, authored by Keane, examining the legacy of Rupert Murdoch, father of Lachlan and executive chairman of News Corp.”

(Murdoch caricature by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Creative Commons license)