Kingdom crumbling as Jones loses fear factor
David Penberthy
Monday, October 01, 2012 (5:52pm)
THE motto by which Alan Jones lives his life is unravelling. The qualities he trades on - blind loyalty, fear and commercial power - no longer function.
Towards the end of his life he is flailing about like some deposed Eastern European dictator, demanding respect and fairness when he has displayed little, claiming victimhood when he has engaged in an act of victimisation which even by his standards sets an abysmal new low.
I have had a few private dinners over the years with the Sydney broadcaster. It is a rite of passage when you edit a newspaper in Sydney, as I did, to pay homage to the man and bask dutifully in his perceived greatness.
I?ve been on his show several times and 2GB hundreds of times. I?ve been to his apartment in the ?Toaster? building, where his servant prepared chicken and celery sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and served Irish Breakfast Tea in the finest Wedgewood china.
Jones? mantra in his personal dealings is ?pick and stick?. It is both a promise and a demand of unwavering loyalty, by which those in his circle pledge to stick by each other through controversy and scandal. Jones is an inveterate letter writer and will put pen to paper to upbraid those he perceives as disloyal or disrespectful. He would probably regard a column such as this as fitting that category. So be it.
His comments about Julia Gillard?s late father were a disgrace. His subsequent apology was pathetic. Anyone with a pinch of decency should now be prepared to man up, as Jones laughably declared at the start of Sunday?s press conference, and tell Jones where he can stick his pick and stick.
In order to understand Jones you first have to recognise that he is defined by a deep-seated siege mentality, where life is regarded as a permanent ideological war and those around him are drawn up on the lists he assembles in his mind of friends and foes. The contradiction of Jones, who has no real personal life at all, is that when he is not broadcasting he busies himself with generous acts for put-upon individuals and families, doing unpaid charity work, writing letters to ministers on behalf of people who are illiterate or uneducated.
This kindly work fuels his sense of indignation when he is at the centre of scandal.
What he has never been able to recognise is that the kindly nature of his private work is often eclipsed by the sometimes desperately unkind or unpleasant nature of his public conduct.
At every controversial juncture in his career Jones has acted as if he is the victim of a conspiracy.
In his public life Jones instinctively regards any attack on him not as the result of his own wrongdoing, but the small-minded hatefulness of his persecutors.
This was the case with the cash-for-comment episode, a dictionary definition scandal, in which Jones and 2GB were paid large sums of money by the Australian Banking Association to go easy on the major banks. It is hard to imagine a greater betrayal of the people who live on what Jones and his former stablemate John Laws liked to call ?Struggle Street? than parroting praise for the banks to a working-class and pensioner audience.
Yet Jones never grasped the moral bankruptcy of his conduct, regarding his pursuit by ACMA as an appalling example of the tall poppy syndrome.
This typical sense of persecution underscored Sunday?s press conference, at which Jones breezed over his apology to launch a fresh attack on the government of Ju-Liar, as he likes to call her.
Laughably, he took aim at News Limited for having the audacity to report his speech - as if it is the media?s job to ignore one of the most powerful people in Australia make the most appalling remarks in front of our next generation of political leaders and current members of the parliament.
As a result of the Gillard remarks, Jones has found himself with few friends. Many of those who are in the pick-and-stick club, who in the past would habitually declare that their friend had been fitted up or taken out of context, have unequivocally declared his comments a disgrace.
Jones has historically cowed politicians into appearing on his show. While Jones is Australia?s archest conservative he does not as a matter of course go after all Labor MPs. Some, such as Bob Carr when he was NSW premier, managed to get an often favourable run by paying homage to Jones and stroking his ego.
Conversely, others were bludgeoned into appearing after sustained on-air attacks, only to relent for an interview where the shellacking was even worse.
It has now dawned on politicians of the centre and the left that they should no longer worry about their Jones strategy. It has taken a long time for this penny to drop. The reality has always been that Jones? audience does not comprise many swinging voters. He is preaching to the angry and the converted, many of whom keep listening to 2GB because they are too frail to get off the sofa to change the dial.
As the Kyle Sandilands sagas have demonstrated, the only currency which radio networks understand is the advertising dollar, and it is here where the ramifications from his remarks could be most acute.
Six big advertisers have confirmed they will not advertise on his show, some have said they will boycott the entire network, and more will surely follow.
Jones, who is fond of talking of himself in the third person, lashed out at the Twitter campaign for an advertising boycott, and talked about how horrible it was (and it is) that some have wished his cancer to return.
?This is the best way to neutralise and silence Alan Jones. They use this as an excuse to silence Alan Jones,? he said.
It?s almost as bad as saying a woman?s father died of shame over their daughter. This is karma writ large. Alan Jones is getting everything he deserves.
