The defamation case, brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten for airing accusations that he raped Brittany Higgins, turned into a bonfire of the vanities. Fed by the highly flammable egos of its subjects, the flames lit, licked, and grew fat upon the foibles of institutions and individuals.
The case has blackened the reputations of an unexpected breadth of characters. Justice Michael Lee catalogued the participants and the various harms they have sustained or inflicted on themselves in the course of his judgment, delivered on Monday, extracting a morality tale for our times.
There are three groups of players in the saga: the political class, the media, and the judiciary.
Lee was unsparing in his analysis of the way the case became public to begin with. Brittany Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz pitched the story of her rape in Parliament House, covered up by powerful political players, to journalist Lisa Wilkinson at Network Ten. In his findings, Justice Lee laid out how the story had been spun by the young media advisers and how eagerly Wilkinson accepted their angle. While Lee found the rape took place, he found no evidence of a cover-up; he leaves between the lines the question of why the couple chose a media route in the circumstances outside the remit of his ruling. Recordings of pre-production chats between Wilkinson, Higgins and Sharaz revealed why: the trio had a shared interest in inflicting political damage on the Coalition government.
Noting that Wilkinson has an Order of Australia for services to print and broadcast journalism, Lee delivered a reminder to the media of the role the public expects of a reporter. He regretted that she had thought of things from the perspective of a champion for Brittany Higgins instead.
Network Ten, the main respondent to Lehrmann’s defamation claim, also received a drubbing. Not only did Lee suggest that it failed to research the story adequately, but that its senior lawyer gave inexplicably terrible advice to Wilkinson regarding her speech for the Logies, which ended up delaying the trial. While Lee found the truth defence had been established it was despite, not in consequence of, the interview produced by the network.
But Ten was not allowed to hog the media low-lights. Channel 7 managed to annex its share of the media shame. Not only did it pay exorbitantly for its interview with Lehrmann, but it did so in the peculiar currency of sham friendship, T-bones, hookers, blow and seaside accommodation. Extraordinarily, Channel 7 also agreed not to ask Lehrmann about what happened on the night in question. The price of the interview was far more interesting than the edited pap that eventually ran. Surely, the lesson must be that flagging TV ratings come from hiding the real insights.
Also party to the embarrassment should be the media outlets which reported and omitted facts in constellations designed to please their audiences – and audiences who choose media that would keep them “psychologically safe” from information that ran contra to their preferred truth. Some outlets began by championing the rule of law but evolved into advocates for Lehrmann. Others ignored the strategic media campaign orchestrated by Higgins and her partner in order to preserve an unpolluted victim halo. Lee finally delivered the whole story as it should have been presented all along.
The grand moral of the Lehrmann fable is yet to unfold
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20.04.2024
The defamation case, brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten for airing accusations that he raped Brittany Higgins, turned into a bonfire of the vanities. Fed by the highly flammable egos of its subjects, the flames lit, licked, and grew fat upon the foibles of institutions and individuals.
The case has blackened the reputations of an unexpected breadth of characters. Justice Michael Lee catalogued the participants and the various harms they have sustained or inflicted on themselves in the course of his judgment, delivered on Monday, extracting a morality tale for our times.
There are three groups of players in the saga: the political class, the media, and the judiciary.
Lee was unsparing in his analysis of the way the case became public to begin with. Brittany Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz pitched the story of........
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