The mouse that roared: how a little Australian website stared down Murdoch’s mighty News Corp

As Lachlan Murdoch's day in the witness stand in the Dominion v Fox News case drew closer, at home in Australia the News Corp co-chairman was keen to make a separate legal case against an independent news website go away.

On Friday, just days after Fox News reached a $US787.5m settlement with Dominion in the US defamation lawsuit, Murdoch's lawyers filed one line in Australia's federal court to discontinue "the whole of the proceedings".

The whole of the proceedings was a defamation case Murdoch had brought against an Australian publication last August for daring to link him to the 6 January Capitol riots.

After hundreds of hours spent in preliminary court battles and thousands of pages of discovery, he simply dropped his case against the Australian media company Private Media, the publisher of news website Crikey.

This was the second time in a week Murdoch had walked away from a legal challenge, with this bill certain to be significantly less, but still likely in the millions.

It was quite the backflip by the 50-year-old media mogul whose legal case has played out in lurid media headlines for eight months. He launched the proceedings after Crikey named the Murdoch family as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the US Capitol riot.

Written by Crikey's political editor Bernard Keane, the article did not name Lachlan Murdoch, but was headlined "Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator".