Lachlan Murdoch prepares to sue Australian news outlet over January 6 allegations

Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, has vowed to sue the Australian news site Crikey over its claims the network was responsible for the January 6th Capitol riot and which places some of the blame specifically on the Murdochs.

The article was initially removed over the threat of legal action but has since been republished with additional information concerning the potential lawsuit.

Since taking over the network, Murdoch has walked a fine line between his personal dislike of former President Trump and his wish to avoid alienating Fox News’ viewership base, but it seems the article typed up by Bernard Keane at Crikey is out of line in Murdoch’s eyes.

In it, Keane paints the Murdochs as co-conspirators akin to the Watergate scandal, which is every leftist’s go-to exemplar of all that is wrong with the Republican Party, and much like the Jan 6. riot, tends to be the only act of bad behavior the perpetually self-incognizant left-wing cares to acknowledge.

One section begins with the topic sentence, “Comparisons with Watergate or any previous political scandal in the US are meaningless.”

Then Keane proceeds to make the comparison.

“Trump might share profound personality flaws and psychotic characteristics with Richard Nixon, but Nixon — a congressman, then twice elected vice-president and twice elected president — was an establishment political figure.”

“He felt entitled to break the law, but his actions were those of a paranoiac terrified of what information he didn’t have and that others had within the conventional system of American politics, despite his landslide reelection in 1972.”

He continues, “None of these applies to Trump. He thinks nothing of the destruction of American democracy itself. Far from avowing ‘I’m not a crook’, Trump boasted he could murder people in broad daylight and his supporters would still love him. His election loss didn’t bring to an end the crisis he inflicted on the American political system, it simply propelled it into a new and perhaps just as dangerous phase,” Keane writes.

“And Nixon didn’t have the support of the world’s most powerful media company, which continues — even in the face of mountains of evidence of Trump’s treachery and crimes — to peddle the lie of the stolen election and play down the insurrection Trump created.”

Keane concluded, “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.”

For their part, Fox News doesn’t seem too worried about the outcome. In fact, this is not the first time Murdoch has responded to Crikey with legal action. A similar legal skirmish last April ended up costing the website $14,000 in legal fees.

“We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs,” Fox News said in a statement about the lawsuits.

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