Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

They called him a murderer. A war criminal. A domestic abuser. But now we know — they had help. Secret help. Unethical help. And it came from the very heart of Australian news media outlet Nine News’ so-called “investigative” machine.

• Nine News obtained confidential legal strategy details from Ben Roberts-Smith’s ex-wife and her friend during his defamation trial.
• A Nine journalist was secretly recorded admitting to breaching ethics and receiving privileged information, which helped their legal case.
• Ben Roberts-Smith has never been charged with any criminal offence, yet was publicly branded a war criminal based on a civil ruling.
• Nine News defamed economist Peter Schiff, with the court ruling their legal defence had no reasonable chance of success.
• Nine News engages in dishonest journalism and spreads misinformation. Readers should boycott their media platforms.

Ben Roberts-Smith is Australia’s most decorated living soldier. A Victoria Cross recipient. A former SAS corporal who put his life on the line to protect Australian values and lives. For his bravery, he was awarded the highest military honour in the land.

And yet, Nine News — through its newspapers and its powerful TV platform — ran a years-long smear campaign to tear him down. They accused him of war crimes. Of unlawfully killing unarmed Afghan prisoners. Of domestic abuse. Their stories were published in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and broadcast on 60 Minutes.

In response, Roberts-Smith sued them for defamation in what was dubbed “the defamation trial of the century”.

Let’s be absolutely clear: Ben Roberts-Smith has never been charged with a criminal offence. Not for war crimes. Not for murder. Not for anything. There has never been a criminal trial, let alone a conviction.

Yet, in June 2023, the Federal Court dismissed his defamation case. Justice Besanko ruled that Nine’s reporting had established the substantial truth of several allegations against Roberts-Smith, including unlawful killings during his service in Afghanistan.

But here’s what many Australians don’t realise: this was a civil trial, not a criminal one. The court used the “balance of probabilities” test, which means it only had to believe something was more likely than not to be considered proven. This is a far cry from the criminal standard of “beyond reasonable doubt.” So, while the judge sided with Nine on several points, that does not mean Roberts-Smith has been proven guilty in a court of law.

Now, consider this: Australia trained Ben Roberts-Smith and men like him to be killing machines. We then ordered them into Afghanistan — a hellhole of a warzone littered with IEDs, crawling with jihadis, where every farmer could be an insurgent and every child a spotter. And we expect every decision, every action, every bullet fired in that chaos to be neat, nice, and legally perfect?

In my opinion, if anything, the people who should be in the dock are the politicians and commanders who sent men like Roberts-Smith to kill in our name — then abandoned them when the media came sniffing for blood.

And now, it gets worse.

Major Breach

A bombshell secret recording — revealed by Sky News — has caught one of Nine’s supposedly star investigative reporters admitting to something deeply unethical. In his own words, recorded during the defamation trial, the reporter said:

“I’ve just breached my f***ing ethics… This has put me in a sh** position now. If Dean knew that and Peter knew that, I’d get my ass f***ing handed to me on a platter.”

Dean and Peter, referenced in the recording, are senior lawyers from MinterEllison who were representing Nine in the defamation trial.

Why did the Nine reporter believe he was in a “sh** position”? Because he had just admitted that Roberts-Smith’s ex-wife and her friend were “actively briefing us on his legal strategy.” That’s not journalism. That’s a backdoor into privileged legal information.

He even said the leak was “helpful” to Nine’s case. Helpful how? Helpful in defending their media war against a national war hero.

If a soldier leaked battlefield intelligence to the enemy, it’d be called treason. When a reporter boasts about receiving a litigant’s confidential legal strategy — it’s waved away by Nine as nothing to worry about.

Indeed, Nine said in a public statement:

“Having reviewed the audio clip, with support from external counsel, we can confirm there is no breach of legal privilege or ethical concerns. Nine has full confidence in the reporting and actions of [the reporter]…”

That’s how low the bar has fallen in the Australian media.

Because this isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern, perhaps even a formula: identify a high-profile target, distort the facts, find a leaker, and bulldoze the presumption of innocence.

Targeted

Just ask Peter Schiff — a high-profile conservative economist known for his hard stance against big government, central banks, and socialist economic policy. Schiff was targeted by Nine News and 60 Minutes Australia in a now-discredited segment that claimed his bank was enabling tax evasion and money laundering.

Schiff sued. He won. And he didn’t just win — he torched them.

The Federal Court ruled that Nine’s defence had “no reasonable prospects of success” and awarded Schiff $550,000 in damages, plus indemnity costs — a rare and severe penalty reserved for especially poor conduct in litigation.

Justice Jackman was damning. He found that even if Nine’s allegations were taken at face value, they still couldn’t justify what was published. Their entire legal case collapsed before trial.

Schiff later publicly stated that Nine News “lied and committed fraud”, that they “falsified their own evidence”, and that their broadcast was “complete fraud”. He dared Nine to sue him if that wasn’t true. They didn’t.

This is who they are.

Blatant Bias

Nine News is now perhaps the most left-wing mainstream media outlet in the country — a staggering achievement, considering the ideological tilt of SBS, the ABC, and The Guardian. But Nine doesn’t just lean left — it weaponises that position. If you’re a conservative, you’re a target.

They’re the same people who declared Ben Roberts-Smith a “war criminal” — without any court of law ever saying so.

It’s time to take stock.

• A Nine reporter admitted — on tape — that he breached his ethics and had insider access to Roberts-Smith’s legal strategy.
• Nine publicly declared there was no issue.
• In another case, Nine was found to have defamed a prominent conservative.
• The court said their defence was legally hopeless.
• Schiff says they falsified evidence. He says they lied. He says it was fraud.

These are the same people who told you Ben Roberts-Smith was a criminal.

These latest revelations — especially the Nine reporter’s own admissions — should trigger the overturning of the defamation judgment against Roberts-Smith. If that happens, Nine and every other outlet will be legally and morally obligated to stop calling him a “war criminal.”

Because there is no conviction. No criminal charge. No court of law has found him guilty. Only a media mob and a civil ruling — based on a lower standard of proof — driven by insiders and leaks.

This is your warning: never believe anything you see, hear, or read from Nine News. Switch off 60 Minutes. Stop buying The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. They don’t report the truth. They rewrite it.

They rewrite it. Twist it. Package it. Sell it. And call it news when it’s really muckraking. And if they can do it to Ben Roberts-Smith and Peter Schiff — they can do it to you.

___

Republished with thanks to Nation First. Image courtesy of Adobe.