The story and the tweets came after a May 30 broadcast onThe Continuous Call Team,a sports program on Sydney radio station 2GB,where Ms Molan referred to Pacific Islander NRL players by saying the phrase “hooka looka mooka hooka fooka”.
Ms Molan has maintained that she was referring to a well-known story on the program,about broadcasters Ray Warren and Chris Warren attempting to pronounce a Pacific Islander name unsuccessfully,which made her fellow broadcasters the butt of the joke.
On Monday,Ms Molan’s barrister Kieran Smark,SC,told Justice Robert Bromwich that the online publisher “took something that perhaps was silly,perhaps was frivolous,perhaps even miscued a bit on the day,and turned it into something which was sinister and immensely damaging.”
Mr Smark said theContinuous Call Team program is light-hearted and filled with banter,typically in the form of the hosts ribbing each other,and the May 30 broadcast was “taken completely out of context and distorted by theDaily Mail,and what that in turn did was set running a social media frenzy”.
He said a reporter from theDaily Mail contacted Ms Molan and her employer Nine – which owns this masthead – to request a comment. Neither of the responses said Ms Molan’s remark was an “inside joke”,however that term made it into theDaily Mail story on June 4 in quotation marks.
Ms Molan is suing over a story published on June 5,which repeated the “inside joke” description and claimed she had refused to apologise.Daily Mail staff had contacted Ms Molan and Nine through text messages and emails asking if she would apologise,however she had not responded by the time they published the story.
She apologised in a broadcast on 2GB on the afternoon of June 5,which was played to the court on Monday.