Last December, the select committee investigating the riot revealed that Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade urged a senior Trump aide to get the president to act against the riot.

Meanwhile, a US Congressional hearing last month heard that Trump was watching live footage of the riot on Fox News as it happened, ignoring pleas from his family and advisors to step in.

Rupert Murdoch, who is not an Australian citizen, is widely known not to sue for defamation. However, Lachlan Murdoch is more litigious and this is not the first time he has demanded an apology from Crikey.

In April last year, Crikey deleted an article by its founder, Stephen Mayne, which made claims about Murdoch’s tenure as a board member of Channel Ten. Fray said at the time that Mayne had made a series of mistakes in the article and had agreed to “keep the current apology on the homepage for 14 days”.

It cost Crikey $14,000 in legal costs and was settled between the two parties. Crikey was also forced to apologise in September 2020 for likening Murdoch to an organised crime figure.

In 2012, Lachlan Murdoch settled a defamation case against Fairfax Media, the previous publisher of this masthead, over an article that ran in The Age’s CBD column about his alleged use of News Corp’s corporate jet. He donated the $50,000 settlement to charity.

Murdoch, who is the CEO of Fox Corp and a non-executive chairman of News Corporation, is facing two major lawsuits in the US from voting machine companies that are seeking billions of dollars in damages over claims that Fox News’ lies about the 2020 election destroyed their businesses.

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