Steve Price victory over founder remembered in Crikey celebrations

To celebrate its 15th birthday, the leftist online journal Crikey has been publishing some of it’s highlights from those 15 tumultuous years along with some lowlights too.

The journal and it’s fearless founder Stephen Mayne almost went broke soon after it began following a defamation action brought against them by then 3AW talk presenter Steve Price, (below) now at 2GB.

In 2001, Price won a settlement of $50,000, forcing Mayne to sell his house.

Clearly, Mayne hadn’t learnt his lesson as he soon found himself embroiled in another defamation action, this time from former Labor Senator, Nick Bolkus who was able, through the courts, to extract a further $25,000 from the embattled Mayne. 

Now older and wiser, Mayne has good advice for anyone in media wanting to take a swipe at anyone in high places, telling Crikey“The secret that I learnt with the Steve Price litigation and the Nick Bolkus litigation was that at the first sign of trouble, apologise, bow and scrape and mitigate the risk.

“The thing I did with both of them is I provoked them, I further antagonised them.”

As part of Crikey‘s 15th birthday celebrations, the current owners – the website was sold to Eric Beecher’s Private Media in 2005 – spoke to Mayne at his Templestowe house, the final Crikey bunker when it was opened by Mayne.

“Subsequent to that I had a policy of that, when I had a little whisper that someone was upset, I would write something that would try and neutralise their feelings. It’s just a risk-management thing — I say that always have a very generous corrections policy. 

Sometimes people said ‘oh Crikey’s not very accurate’ and that was partly because I was so busily over-correcting, or being far more honest with corrections as a litigation-mitigation strategy, and I think that’s the key lesson I learnt,” said Stephen Mayne.

Read more and watch the video here.

 

 

 

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