On the day after we reported on Lachlan Murdoch's instruction to "Kill the cow" to senior editors at News Limited just before the announcement of the date of the Federal election by Prime Minister John Howard we received the fax reproduced (scanned) below (Pages 1 to 5 of Fairfax fax).
Murdoch was referring to Hanson as the cow and the killing being her political career. Roll on Australian democracy.
18th September 1998
Page 1 of Fairfax fax
Page 2 of Fairfax fax
Page 3 of Fairfax fax
Page 4 of Fairfax fax
Page 5 of Fairfax fax
Att: Mr XXXXX
Fairfax
From: Scott Balson
Interactive Presentations Pty Ltd
By fax
Your fax dated 17th September 1998 faxed at 6.45pm
Dear Sir,
The first point that you need to understand is that the Australian National News of the Day has absolutely no association with One Nation. It is an independent daily newspaper and should be seen as such. (See: http://www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/disclaimer.html)
The second point that you need to realise is that in our coding today it appears that we may have left off the code "target="_top" from the source URL in the web page pointing to an article on The Sydney Morning Herald web site. This would result in that article on your web site appearing to be part of our "News of the Day" – because of the frame on the left hand side of the computer screen. *As soon as this oversight was brought to our attention we rectified the code and this is no longer case (ie the News of the Day frame disappears when you link to the article). This correction was done within minutes of the error being recognised. Note: No Fairfax material was ever stored or reproduced on our web site as implied in your letter.
The third point that you need to appreciate is that we do not "lift" articles from Fairfax as implied in your letter. We receive a large amount of material over the Internet from a variety of third party correspondents and carry much of them in the public interest. We refer to and link to articles that you might carry but ensure that the clips taken from the articles are short and within normal copyright limitations. The only reason we carry these is to stimulate interest (which is to your paper’s benefit). We have no interest in breaching Fairfax’s copyright and have never intended to do so. We are familiar with the copyright law change that took place on 31st June as they affect electronic data.
With respect to the request that a nominated Fairfax representative have access to our subscriber archive. We are happy to oblige on the basis that if any material is found to have originated from Fairfax in breach of copyright that we be advised of the URL so that we can remove it without any legal action being taken. (We would again refer to the large quantity of material that we receive from third party correspondents). We would require 24 hours to check the source of these documents and then, where applicable, to remove them.
Access will be restricted to this Friday, 18th September, and the relevant access codes supplied after your confirmation of acceptance of our condition relating to that access.
We are determined to clear our name on this issue and now await your response.
Yours faithfully
Interactive Presentations Pty Ltd trading as Global Web Builders
Scott Balson
Managing Director
* The stats on hits for a 24 hour period in the graphic below shows the "storm in the tea-cup" over this. (The graphic is a direct copy of that taken of our statistical page on our Internet Service Provider).
ajones7.html (highlighted) was linked without break and was a far more prominent link on the anotd that day.
We estimate that between 40 and 50 would have visited the link to the article at the Sydney Morning Herald and that the only visitor running through the Sydney Morning Herald web site from the link we gave under the anotd frame would be Fairfax staff preparing the legal threat. This number includes those visiting after the code was altered to remove the left hand "frame".
We are unable to give exact numbers on visits to the article by Margo Kingston on Fairfax's web site because it would not register on our stats (being a third party website).