Public Interest Defence Again

[enf]

This time it's channel 9. I just don't get this...how can lying be in the public interest?

This article lays out where channel 9 distorted the truth, as well as outright lied....

Orthopaedic surgeon Munjed Al Muderis claims ‘terrible, terrible lie’ in Nine broadcast

Dr Munjed Al Muderis claims the journalists misunderstood integral parts of the science, which led to errors in the publication.
7:33PM SEPTEMBER 4, 2023
Lawyers for a renowned orthopaedic surgeon claim an amputee who cut off an overgrowth of connective tissue with a kitchen knife after surgery didn’t do so because he was in such incredible pain or “feeling so abandoned” post-op, as suggested in a 60 Minutes broadcast, but because he wanted a cheap and easy solution.
Munjed Al Muderis, an expert in osseointegration – a surgical procedure to place a prosthetic implant into the bone – is suing the Nine Network in the Federal Court over a 60 Minutes episode and articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age late last year. He says the journalists defamed him when they painted him as a negligent surgeon who used high-pressured sales tactics to the detriment of his clients.

Nine is running a public-interest defence.

Leading defamation lawyer Sue Chrysanthou SC used the opening day of the hearing to lay out the falsehoods she claimed were made in Nine’s reporting.

“The patient in the broadcast who (they) said took a knife to granulation tissue: the way its presented is as though he sat there one day … grabbed a kitchen knife and cut himself. (That’s a) total lie,” Ms Chrysanthou said.

Rather, she said, military veteran Brennan Smith visited Dr Al Muderis and various GPs for the proper removal of the granulation tissue but “decided it was so easy he should just start doing it himself”.

“He happily does it himself at home, but that’s not how it was presented in the broadcast.”

Former paratrooper Mark #Urquhart told 60 Minutes he found maggots on his surgical wounds after an osseointegration procedure in 2016, but was ignored by Dr Al Muderis. “I sent the video to Munjed straight away and I never got a #response from him,” Mr Urquhart told the broadcast.

But Ms Chrysanthou said he sent the video to Dr Al Muderis in December 2020, six weeks after he filmed it and received a #response from the practice straight away. She said this was “unsurprising” because he had maggots one other time about 18 months earlier and was given a protocol on how to clean it.

More than three years after his surgery, Mr Urquhart sent a letter to Dr Al Muderis, the court heard, where he thanked him in the strongest terms. Ms Chrysanthou said the fact that journalist Charlotte Grieve was given a copy of that letter before publication was the “death knell of that defence”.

Early patient Carol Todd, who had her leg amputated when she was a baby, was pictured in the Herald in a wheelchair, but Ms Chrysanthou told the court she was “happily walking around” at the time of publication with her osseointegration implant using one walking stick.

Ms Chrysanthou said Grieve had set out to “ruin my clients life” and described her report as an #“attack” many times.

Dr Al Muderis’s legal team claims the journalists “embarrassingly” misunderstood integral parts of the science, which led to “a terrible, terrible lie” being published about osseointegration surgery.

It also says he was misled into the interview on 60 Minutes and was not given proper opportunity to respond to each of the claims.

The Nine Network will outline its case in the next few days. The hearing is expected to run for 12 weeks.