When Alan Jones suggested Scott Morrison should shove a sock down the throat of the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, last year it was the final straw for many in a 35-year radio career that has seen the divisive Sydney personality survive scandal time and time again.
Jones’s radio ratings were consistently so high and his political connections so impeccable he hung on to his career despite uttering numerous racial slurs, making misogynist comments about female leaders, raising the ire of broadcasting authorities and attracting eye-watering defamation payouts and legal fees.
But nine months after he apologised to Ardern for “not choosing his words carefully”, the anger about his attacks on her and other high-profile women – including the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard and the Opera House chief, Louise Herron – failed to die.
On Tuesday the 79-year-old surprised everyone by announcing his last day on the radio would be 28 May – a year before his current contract with Nine Radio was due to expire.
“I have listened to the experts and I am taking this opportunity to indicate to my radio family that I will be retiring from radio at the end of this month,” Jones told listeners.
The Nine chief executive, Hugh Marks, acknowledged Jones’s contribution to 2GB and 2UE before that over many years.
“Alan has shown a dedication to his craft unlike any other and with that dedication comes excellence,” Marks said.
Jones has been struggling with health issues for many years. He was forced off the air in late 2018 due to painful back spasms and has recovered from a near-fatal E coli infection.
Now, he says, the time has come to listen to the doctors and step down from a gruelling schedule that saw him rise at 2.30am every weekday to host his program.
Cash for comment
The Ardern comments came almost a decade after Jones shocked with harsh comments about Gillard. In 2011 Jones said she should be “put in a chaff bag” and dumped at sea, and then came back the following year with more insults after the death of her father.
“Every person in the caucus of the Labor party knows that Julia Gillard is a liar, everybody,” Jones said at a Sydney University Liberal club dinner. “I will come to that in a moment. The old man recently died a few weeks ago of shame. To think that he has a daughter who told lies every time she stood for parliament.”
He also said the Labor leader was only ahead in the polls because she had been crying publicly after the death of her father.
“Of course she’s ahead in preferred prime minister,” he said. “She cries because her father died, she’s on the news every day.”
The comments, secretly recorded by a journalist, were condemned by both sides of politics. The former Labor premier Bob Carr said they were “indecent” and a petition calling for Jones to be sacked received more than 35,000 signatures. Macquarie conceded the incident cost it $1.5m in lost revenue after an advertiser boycott.
Jones’s first major professional challenge as a broadcaster was the cash for comment inquiry in 1999, which resulted in a suite of new rules to prevent commercial broadcasters using their platforms to secretly promote brands.
Jones – who was compelled to give evidence at the inquiry – was found by the Australian Broadcasting Authority to have been making unscripted comments favourable to Telstra and Qantas, who had undisclosed contracts with the broadcaster. Despite months of negative headlines, Jones survived at 2UE and went on to make even more money when he took up an offer from John Singleton to defect to 2GB in 2001.
Six years later, Jones was scrutinised by the media watchdog again over his role in the Cronulla riots. He read out a text message from a listener, which asked people to “Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge ... get down to North Cronulla”.
Jones also told a caller who said she’d heard derogatory remarks about Middle Eastern people at Cronulla not to get “carried away”.
“Let’s not get too carried away … We don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in western Sydney.”
In 2007 the Australian Communications and Media Authority found that 2GB and Jones had broadcast material that was “likely to encourage violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern backgrounds on the basis of ethnicity”.
Jones did not accept the finding and challenged the authority through the courts, but lost. Seven years after making the remarks he was forced to read out a prepared statement on air after his own apology did not satisfy the courts.
A year earlier Jones had been found in breach of the commercial radio standards over his reporting on environmental issues when the authority ruled he had failed to be accurate and had failed to allow other viewpoints to be heard. He continues to deny climate science and in recent weeks has come under fire for underplaying the threat of Covid-19 as well.
“In this modern world, at the slightest provocation it seems, we revert – despite all the money spent on education – we revert to hysteria and alarmism,” he said in March. “We now seem to be facing the health version of global warming. Exaggeration in almost everything. Certainly in description, and certainly in behaviour.”
Chris Masters, who wrote an acclaimed book about Jones in 2006, said his radio dominance gave him an influence so great he had “all manner of princes and premiers bowing before him”.
“He was always good at fooling people willing to be fooled,” Masters wrote in Jonestown. “And three to four hours of radio a day for all those years become such a blur. The truth is just more ephemera. As long as he keeps talking the inconsistencies are swept along in the sheer volume of verbiage: his editorials and opinions must now number in the tens of thousands.”
Fourteen years later, when Jones announced his retirement, his influence was still strong and politicians lined up to congratulate him on his career, including the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese.
Exodus of advertisers
Nine insists it was Jones’s choice to walk away early, but it’s an open secret that he was costing the company dearly in lost advertising revenue.
“He had great ratings, but was bringing in no revenue,” one radio source says. “There is too much brand risk for advertisers to be involved with Jones after all the protests.”
Sources say Nine has cut its losses and paid out the remainder of his contract and “tied up all the loose ends before the end of the financial year”.
After the Ardern incident 2GB installed an extra “dump” button in the studio to try to prevent another disaster, but the damage was already done.
The exodus of advertisers from Jones’s show after activists targeted brands on social media was unprecedented.
Jones was defiant, claiming there would be “others to take their place” and that he was the victim of a social media mob.
But more than 500 advertisers pulled their money out of 2GB and sources say the program lost half its revenue. With Jones on a $4m salary he became a liability, despite his ratings dominance in the breakfast slot and his political clout with the Coalition.
After a lengthy period of negotiation with 2GB’s owners, Jones was given a new two-year deal when Macquarie Media was taken over by Nine Entertainment and became Nine Radio late last year.
But “Australia’s most popular talkback presenter” never bounced back into the good books with advertisers.
Apart from the lost revenue, Jones was very expensive to insure after he and Macquarie were hit with a record defamation payout of $3.7m after he falsely claimed the Wagner family was responsible for 12 deaths in 2011, when a wall of a quarry they owned collapsed during the Lockyer Valley floods. Jones’s career is littered with legal challenges, including one from the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman and another from the rugby league referee Bill Harrigan.
Jones may be turning off his microphone but he is not retiring. He will continue writing his column for the Daily Telegraph and appearing on his own show on Sky News.
“After 35 years the full stop has to go somewhere,” he said on Tuesday.
“I’m not retiring, I’m just retiring from radio.”
