In this week’s ABR podcast, David Rolph, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, analyses the implications of the aborted Murdoch v Crikey defamation case concerning the January 6 attacks on the Capital building. Rolph argues that it was set to be an early test of the new public interest defence within federal defamation law but that Lachlan Murdoch likely dropped the action because of its implications for legal proceedings in the US involving his media company. Listen to David Rolph, the author of books including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law, read ‘Who blinks first: Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey’, from the June issue of ABR.

Lachlan Murdoch’s defamation proceedings against Crikey promised to be a test case on the new public interest defence. Following Murdoch’s discontinuation of his claim in April, the scope and application of the public interest defence to defamation await another appropriate vehicle.

Lachlan Murdoch will almost certainly be the next head of News Corp, one of the world’s largest media companies and the dominant force in Australia’s media landscape. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Patrick Mullins, visiting fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography, reviews a new biography of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning, titled The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch. Listen to Mullins read ‘Dual Focus’, which appears in the December issue of ABR.