On a 2019 trip to Australia to purchase several drums of the bovine placenta used to fade his father’s liver spots and reverse the aging process, Lachlan Murdoch picked up a copy of The Portsea Bugle and was dumbfounded that there existed a news outlet every bit as credible as The Herald Sun but not owned by his family.  He returned to New York and as soon as his father had awoken from his cryogenic slumber showed him a copy of The Bugle.  Rupert Murdoch was stunned.  He immediately contacted Dr. Erstwhile Truthwright and offered to buy the paper.  Truthwright refused.

Rupert Murdoch and Dr Erstwhile Truthwright were not strangers.  The two men had met several decades earlier after the founder and CEO of the HHDRS had cornered Murdoch outside London’s Old Bailey to warn him that his then wife, Wendy Deng, had been a crew member on the Communist Chinese submarine that in 1967 had snatched Sir Harold Holt.  Truthwright warned Murdoch not to trust Deng, and under no circumstances should he enter an open body of water with her.  But before the media mogul could ask any questions, the 213kg Truthwright had melted into the crowd.

That Murdoch was disappointed by Truthwright’s refusal to sell the Bugle is an understatement.  Many commentators have blamed the episode on the breakdown in Murdoch’s relationships with several of his other children.  In 2023 he again approached Truthwright with an offer, which was again rejected. 

For Truthwright, The Bugle was not for sale.  For him, its role as a corrective to the leftwing bias spewed by Murdoch’s stable of print and television outlets meant it was a critical fixture on the national political landscape, and he was not prepared to jeopardise its status.  The Bugle’s recent reporting on an illicit Kombucha substitution ring run out of the office of Foreign Minister Penny Wong steeled Truthwright’s resolve and he chafed at the prospect of a story as important as this being truncated in favour of three-quarter page ads for Harvey Norman.  (Animus between Truthwright and Harvey Norman owner Gerry Harvey goes back to 1989 when a dispute over a faulty recliner ended in the two men brawling in the carpark outside the company’s Sydney headquarters).

Eventually Truthwright and Murdoch agreed on a compromise. The Portsea Bugle would remain in HHDRS hands but News Limited would establish a re-education centre on the grounds of the HHDRS dedicated to investigating innovative ways to inoculate the public from leftwing anti-free market propaganda peddled by the ABC and other public institutions, such as universities, and any organisation not listed in the annual News Limited prospectus.