Nine and Nick Cater to pay Wagners $3.6m after losing 60 Minutes defamation case
Nine and journalist Nick Cater have been ordered to pay the Wagner brothers $3.6m in damages after a Queensland Supreme Court jury found they “gravely” defamed the wealthy family.
In 2015, a 60 Minutes episode suggested the Wagners caused the catastrophic Grantham floods, which killed 12 people and destroyed the town. The program implied that the disaster was caused by the Wagners’ failure to take steps to prevent a quarry wall on their property from collapsing, causing a wall of water to engulf the town.
The jury found that Cater, a journalist at The Australian who featured in the episode, had an “apparent vendetta” against the brothers, claiming the flood was “a man-made disaster that should have been avoided but wasn’t”.
Good result. The media are rampant at this false reporting – particularly guilty of running with Social Media rumours instead of researched and fact-checked stories. And they get away with it becuase 99% of people can’t afdford to fight them – the Wagners could afford it – and by all accounts gave Ch9, The Australian (and Alan Jones) fair time/terms to retract their claims before going to court. Good on the Wagners for taking all these hacks down.
Does this also mean that Cater is done as a journo?
There is a great divide between fact and fantasy, between reality and drama.
The reporting of and comments about the real world are the responsibility of journalists and the media, but the fantasy and drama of life are the responsibilities of the theatre.
When are the networks going to wake up to the fact that so-called “reality television” and the force-fed and stretched so-called “investigative journalism” are poor attempts at some kind of undefined form of theatre, at which the producers and participants are not very proficient?
You now have “reality” participants forced into the role of actors, who are suing for damages on the grounds of being cast as villains, which is a role most actors are desperately wishing to be cast in, and the exposure by investigative journalists of supposed villains, who are suing and winning on the grounds being falsely cast.
In the theatre, we know before we begin where reality and fantasy are divided, the great art is in narrowing the gap, but one must first know its exact dimensions.
Yet he still expects us to take him seriously with his attacks on climate change protesters and critics of the Murdoch media.