‘Not settle, not blink’: Crikey boss on the face-off with Lachlan Murdoch

The case against Private Media was dropped just days after Fox News settled its case with Dominion Voting Systems in the United States.

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The outcome of the Dominion case played a big role in Crikey’s eventual win. Crikey had updated its defence nine days before the case was dropped, looking to use testimony by both Murdochs as part of its own case.

“Clearly the revelations from the Dominion case were the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Hayward said.

“I had a conversation with someone in the days before them backing out, where they reported to me that the other side was saying Dominion has had no impact on the case, it’s entirely separate, it’s a different geography, etc. and I responded saying I thought that was preposterous.

“And it showed to be preposterous. They cancelled their case within days.”

Hayward says Crikey “absolutely” wanted the fight, but the litigation was “fundamentally spurious” and Crikey didn’t initiate it.

“But once the initial concerns notice was sent, once the attempt to censor what Bernard [Keane, the author of the article in question] had written was made, we were in a position where either we had to apologise, or we had to take them on.”

Defamation laws in Australia have been put to the test this year, with the stoush between Murdoch and Crikey, as well as the long-awaited judgment on the action brought against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times by Ben Roberts-Smith, delivering high-profile wins for press freedom.

Hayward concedes that while there was always a chance Crikey’s strategy could have backfired, his team believed the risk calculation “weighed heavily in our favour”.

“We felt that this wouldn’t end up in the courtroom. We were prepared to stand in the witness box and give evidence; we were prepared to defend our reporting.”

As for Churchill’s claim, Hayward couldn’t say exactly how many new subscribers the campaign had netted the site, though he suggested 5000 “sounds about right”. At its standard yearly price point, should Crikey manage to retain those new subscribers, that is annual revenue of $995,000.

Crikey does not publish its subscriber figures, though a well-placed source within the company said it stood in the “high 20s”, almost tripling in three years, in part thanks to the Murdoch push.

The legal battle isn’t entirely over. Final costs are still to be settled between the two parties, and the issue of Crikey’s GoFundMe campaign, which raised $588,735, remains unclear.

Top donations included $5000 each from former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. Turnbull, a loud critic of the Murdoch empire, has taken over the mantle of leading calls for a royal commission into the family’s influence on Australian media, after Rudd’s appointment as US ambassador.

He also provided legal and strategic advice to Hayward and co during the process, and was front and centre at Crikey’s celebratory event in Sydney this month, publicly expressing his thoughts on the Murdoch empire heir-apparent.

“I mean, if ever you wondered whether the suggestion that Lachlan Murdoch was not quite as intelligent as his father, any doubt on that matter was completely resolved when he sued Crikey,” the ex-prime minister said.

Peter Fray, who was one of the defendants and editor-in-chief of Crikey, made a high-profile exit in the middle of the case. He was also in the audience on the night.

Coverage of the case in Australia, according to Hayward, “had a high degree of whataboutism” to it. While he is happy for Crikey to be criticised for being extreme or rough around the edges, he said some of the criticism was “a bit surprising”.

US media were astonished, he said, that the proprietor of a multibillion-dollar news organisation that prides itself as a defender of free speech was suing a small independent outlet “for using what some people might say was the tiniest degree of hyperbole in its opinion writing”.

That is extraordinary, he said, and “that is 99 per cent of the story”.

“Clearly we took a bunch of unconventional decisions, so I’m very open to being criticised for those; we should be criticised and there’s no issue from us on that.”

Hayward said defamation laws in Australia continued to be outdated, evidenced by this case along with the recent Ben Roberts-Smith defamation suit.

“We were under the opinion or impression that every major news organisation in Australia agreed with us on that. We probably feel slightly less sure about that now.”

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While an apology to Murdoch was never on the cards, Crikey found itself making one on Friday last week after an opinion piece written by Guy Rundle regarding Brittany Higgins was taken down.

An editorial note admitted several factual errors, while saying “the tone of the piece did not meet Crikey’s journalistic standards, crucially given that it concerns writing about allegations of sexual assault”.

“It was a mistake to publish the piece in the first place, and we take full responsibility for that,” Hayward said, adding Crikey will have more to say on it this week.

Hayward said there were certainly dark days for him personally, though the day after Murdoch dropped proceedings, the first thing he did was contact a dog breeder.

“I’ve been on a campaign to get a dog for at least 38 years and my wife always had a reason to say no. When we moved to Australia, when whichever child is out of nappies, and then the final one was when you’re not being sued by a litigious billionaire. I’m no longer being sued by a litigious billionaire, and so I now have a beautiful black Labrador.”

Despite various obvious suggestions regarding what the dog should be called, “there’s no pun in the name”, he said.

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