6PR Mornings host Liam Bartlett has taken a massive swipe at The West Australian’s ongoing reporting of Victoria Cross recipient Ben Robert-Smith’s defamation trial against rival publications, accusing it of cherry picking information it chose to cover in his court case.

Mr Roberts-Smith, who hails from WA and is now an executive at the newspaper’s Seven West Media, is suing three Nine-owned newspapers over a series of 2018 articles that he says accuse him of wrongdoing including war crimes.

Bartlett’s comments come after Assistant Defence Minister and former elite soldier Andrew Hastie told the Federal Court it was a persistent rumour within the SAS that Mr Roberts-Smith had kicked an Afghan prisoner off a cliff.

“We know that Ben Roberts-Smith has been supported through all of this by [Seven West chairman] Kerry Stokes (above), a huge supporter, monetarily,” Bartlett told News Review panelists Michael Thomson and Julie-Anne Sprague on Friday.

“For there not to be one single word of [Hastie’s] account in that court yesterday in The West Australian newspaper, I think is an absolute disgrace and I think reflects very badly on any paper that considers itself a paper of record.”

Press PLAY below to hear Liam’s spray at The West and what they didn’t report.

Nine is seeking to rely on a defence of truth and allege Mr Roberts-Smith committed or was involved in six murders of Afghans under the control of Australian troops, when they cannot be killed under the rules of engagement.

Mr Hastie, the federal Canning MP, also gave evidence on Friday that another soldier, Person 7, expressed frustrations to him in 2014 that his concerns about Mr Roberts-Smith had fallen on deaf ears.

He said Person 7 noted Mr Roberts-Smith was “Father Of The Year [in 2013] and enjoying a high profile in the community” and he was “greatly vexed that he’d raised a number of issues through the chain of command” about the decorated former soldier.

This included the alleged cliff kick, the accuracy of his citation for Australia’s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross, and an alleged incident involving “shooting an already deceased person on the battlefield”.

Asked if he disliked Mr Roberts-Smith himself, Mr Hastie told the court: “I pity him. I pity this whole process. I don’t want to be here; I was subpoenaed for this.”

His voice choked with emotion as he said he rang his father before he appeared in court “and I asked him to pray with me, and he prayed for Mr Roberts-Smith as well”.

Mr Hastie said he “started from a very high regard for Mr Roberts-Smith” but he was “no longer proud” of him.