Matt Price blogs about Jonestown:
AFTER the weekend publication of extracts of Jonestown it’s clear the ABC board did the corporation a great service by dissociating the national broadcaster from Chris Masters’ book.
The (until now) widely respected investigative journalist is deluding himself by arguing salacious revelations about Alan Jones’s sex life are critical in understanding the broadcaster’s power and influence. Which, incidentally, is routinely overstated.
Beyond Sydney, the broadcaster exerts virtually no influence. His radio program isn’t aired outside NSW where, when you mention “Alan Jones”, there’s a better than even chance people will assume you’re talking about the former champion Formula One driver.
Andrew Bolt took a shot at Jonestown on The Insiders couch yesterday (Transcript of ABC Insiders show on Alan Jones) and it’s hard to disagree with the thesis that the sexual content of Masters’ book is tawdry and gratuitous.
Jones seems to be manic, hypocritical, peculiar, powerful and thin-skinned: traits he’d share with many other radio jocks, but nonetheless the stuff of an interesting biography.
Masters argues the suppression of Jones’s sexual bent is central to his influence and character: that the “masquerade that he is not homosexual is damaging to himself. It is a defining feature of his persona”.
Which sounds an awful lot like tinpot pop psychology seeking to rationalise a rather unedifying dirt job.
Is Jones’s (undeclared) homosexuality fair game? Has the Sydney broadcaster been unfairly traduced?
(For the information of those outside NSW and Victoria, Saturday’s Age and SMH published lengthy extracts of Masters’ book concentrating almost entirely on Alan Jones’s sexuality.)
