Almost anyone else found to have been cheating, lying and secretly on the take would have been the subject of a frothing rant over the airwaves by Sydney shock jock Alan Jones, but when Jones was caught being paid millions in commercial sponsorships over the past decade to present advertising as news, there was no public self-flagellation. As Chris Masters' biography of Jones argues, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) hearings showed that "Jones was for sale", despite Jones's proclamations that his opinions are his alone.
Jones was not alone, however, in tossing off the "cash for comment" challenge. Within two weeks of his ABA debacle, he was hosting a $500-a-plate Liberal Party fund-raiser. NSW politicians continued to offer him homage and to seek his blessing, and his ratings-leading 20% radio market share was hardly dented. For Jones and his loyalists, says Masters, "facts matter less than what is believed" and they wanted to keep believing what they heard from Jones.
To his devoted, mostly older, audience (half his listeners are over 65 and he has nearly two-thirds of the total radio audience aged over 70), Jones offered a voice and surrogate power to those angry about what they perceived as minorities (non-white immigrants, Aboriginals, "welfare mothers") getting handouts at their expense, with crime rampant and unpunished, and militant trade unions needing to be taught their place.
Politicians did not cancel their subscription to Jones's brand of policy by prejudice. In Australia's largest radio market, Sydney, half a million tune in to Jones's morning program, and this so-called "Jones electorate" features in Labor and Liberal strategies to appease Jones to ensure their electoral prospects.
How has Jones come to exercise such power? Born in 1941 in Queensland to a farming and working-class family, Jones was a private school student and then a teacher at the wealthy Brisbane Grammar School and King's School in NSW. Their culture of bullying suited Jones the disciplinarian who ruled in the classroom through emotional abuse and physical violence. Jones also found fame as a schoolboy rugby coach, where his oppressive, high-pressure methods chewed up many an athlete. Jones polarised his world into a favoured group of believers and a growing constellation of the shunned, who were served with a diet of vindictive cruelty and screaming sessions.
Jones unsuccessfully sought a parliamentary career from the mid-1970s with the Liberals, eventually becoming a speech writer for Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, before becoming executive director of the NSW Employers Federation in 1981. A rugby union coach at the elite level from 1983, the sports-loving conservative advocated busting sports sanctions against Apartheid South Africa.
As a talk-radio host for two of Sydney's commercial stations (2UE from 1985, 2GB from 2001), Jones' on-air tirades were the ugly face of right-wing politics.
Off-mike, his personal behaviour was equally repulsive. Banging on about getting tough on violent criminals, Jones himself was an office bully. His shouting rages drove staff to tears and resignation. Intolerant of mistakes in others, Jones, a noted technophobe, was the author of many technical glitches, which were always fiercely blamed on the technical support staff. The switch operators whose job it was to prepare Jones's breakfast of Weet-Bix and milk, copped the fallout of a full-scale, fuming meltdown if the meal was not prepared just right.
Jones' radio bluster saw politicians alternately cowed and eager to join forces. As NSW opposition leader and premier, Bob Carr couriered his speeches to Jones. In 1995, Jones, a staunch Liberal, backed Carr for premier because he believed that a Carr Labor government would be more right-wing on law and order than the "wet" NSW Liberals. Federally, Jones was a strident Howard backer.
Just as Labor and Liberal sought improved market share through Jones, so did rival telecommunications corporations, Optus and Telstra. In the "cash for comment" scandal, Optus bought Jones as their ventriloquist in 1993, attacking Telstra (then Telecom) and, through "advertorials", extolling Optus under the guise of editorial opinion. Jones's loyalty to Optus lasted only as long as Optus kept paying Jones his $500,000 a year. When Telstra ended its sponsorship with Jones in 2005, Jones resumed his attacks the company. With secret sponsorship deals with other corporations (Qantas, Colonial State Bank, Sunraysia, HarperCollins and the property developers Walker Corporation) Jones received millions of dollars to dishonestly plug his auxiliary paymasters.
Secrecy also defined Jones and his sexuality. Jones, says Masters, hides his homosexuality to preserve his listener base, 46% of whom believe homosexuality is immoral. Masters speculates that the self-imposed repression of Jones's sexual identity may have promoted a self-loathing perversely expressed as a public contempt for the openly homosexual and a worship of homophobic politicians.
Jones may have come close to suicide in 1988 when arrested in London under anti-gay laws on charges of homosexuality and indecency in a public toilet. Although the charges were dropped, Jones continued to deny his sexuality, missing an opportunity to reach out with empathy and compassion to other minority groups like Aboriginals whose value as scapegoats to Jones's right-wing politics is untouchable.
The populist demagogue gathered steam, slagging off the scapegoats, taking on the populist favourites of banks and insurance companies but rarely other big capitalists (unless their rivals paid him to), and winning brownie points for his good deeds (supporting flood victims, drought-affected farmers, children with disabilities). Jones always parades his "battler past", the humble origins of his farmer/coalminer (and union delegate) father, as his authority to be the protector of his self-proclaimed "Struggle Street" constituency.
Masters comprehensively dethrones Jones as the tribune of "Struggle Street". The multi-millionaire Jones, with his extensive race-horse and luxury property holdings, the BMW, the butler and the chauffeured Mercedes, hypocritically criticises "elite" journalists for losing touch with ordinary people. Jones's socially divisive diatribes also seek to ensure that "Struggle Street" remains struggling against its own residents rather than the big end of town.
Masters' book is an industrious project whose factual expositions on the narcissistic and violent personality of Jones mount with horrified fascination. There is more on rugby than you might want to know, but less exploration of the basis of the right-wing populist appeal of Jones. The petit-bourgeois class consciousness of the small businessperson (struggling individualists) makes ideal fodder for Jones, but so, too, do his devoted older and retired workers, feeling unrepresented by politicians and ignored by mainstream media. The working-class Tory, ready to strike out at the nearest and weakest scapegoat, laps up Jones's angry prejudice.
Masters is careful, however, not to fertilise the myth of Jones's power, reminding us that if 20% are listening to Jones, then 80% aren't. The same reality check, alas, was not performed by ABC management which, in June 2006, canned Masters' book after the ABC Board (by now stacked with conservatives appointed by the Howard Government) pulled the plug, not because they were fearful of the cost of litigation (commercial publishers had no such qualms) but to defend one of their own. The ABC's publishing shame, as Masters warns, is an example of an ABC afraid to tackle the big subjects, to show up those like Jones for the right-wing bullies they are.