We have long wondered when the lawsuits might start against Fox News for disinformation on COVID. It is possible that they’ve already started and plaintiffs are simply choosing to not publicize the fact that they’ve filed. But as of yet, we’ve not seen the avalanche of lawsuits that we expected and that Rupert Murdoch himself expected (and worried about).

That doesn’t mean that Fox and the Murdochs are out of the woods. Australia wants to know what’s going on. Australia’s “Sky News” (a Murdoch product) is apparently wholly banned from YouTube for disinformation on COVID and the Australian government wants some answers as to why. It has summoned Lachlan Murdoch to answer, though his appearance isn’t required, these aren’t the types of invitations one normally turns down.

According to the Guardian:

Lachlan Murdoch has been invited to appear before a reconvened Senate inquiry into YouTube’s temporary ban on Sky News Australia for uploading videos in breach of the platform’s Covid misinformation policy.

If the co-chairman of News Corp accepts he will appear alongside his Sky News Australia presenters Alan Jones, Rita Panahi and Rowan Dean who have already agreed to give evidence before the media diversity committee on Monday.

“The committee has called Mr Murdoch to front the inquiry to explain his role in the direction of Sky News and News Corp’s other media outlets,” Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young told Guardian Australia.

This matters to us in the U.S. because massive companies such as the Murdoch empire tend to at least attempt to keep the same standards throughout the company for any number of reasons. Moreover, Murdoch’s answers might well be under oath and there’s no reason that we could discern that would make such answers any less binding were he called here in the United States to answer why his networks were allowing so much COVID misinformation to hit the air.

Lachlan Murdoch has been summoned by the Australian Parliament to answer for SkyNews’s pandemic denial and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Will he have the guts? Or does his contempt for scrutiny extend to ignoring the Senate? #MurdochRoyalCommissionhttps://t.co/SesoM0CXrw

— Office of Kevin Rudd, 26th PM of Australia (@MrKRudd) September 2, 2021

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