Last month’s eulogising of the late Australian “shock jock” John Laws has been revealing on the state of health of what is laughably left of the Fourth Estate. It’s a telling, sociological reading about those in Australian media who tend to be impressionable and provincial, and the members of a deferential political class keen to keep on the right side of an airwave babbler so superficial and bullying he came to be celebrated as “Golden Tonsils”.
Instead of a steely, firm analysis of demagogy and corrupt conduct on the airways, a production line of clichés befitting a gouty monarch or mafia don was in the offing. It was uncritical and mawkish, sinister in showing that everyone in the business of broadcasting and news has reputations soiled and nourished in equal measure. No journalist or official interviewed could be trusted with anything other than proffering such woolly and weak formulations as “John Laws changed my life” or “John Laws changed Australia”.
In the absence of anything original, every other hack, associate, or acquaintance had to reference Australia’s pugilist Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who did sense the political value of keeping such a man in the tent. Out of it, he would have irritably pissed into it. But it seemed Keating had Laws’ number, aware of his vast audience. “Forget the Press Gallery,” Keating dismissively remarked at one point, “educate John Laws and you educate Australia.” It was not a savoury thing to do, but politics is the art, not so much of the possible as the unappetising.
Laws’ life even merited a state funeral sponsored by the New South Wales government. Held at St. Andrew’s Cathedral on November 19, it was an event held, according to a NSW government media release, for “a towering figure in Australian radio whose voice resonated across the nation for more than seven decades.” He left a legacy that lay “not only in the thousands of hours on air, but in the connection he forged with millions of Australians.”
Comments from those attending the funeral proved to be a cataract of snake oil and whitewash. Reverend Jonathan Adams expressed his astonishment that “a man who had a chauffeur” could speak “as an ordinary Australian to ordinary Australians”. Former prime minister and arrestingly dull conservative John Howard judged the Laws legacy in a fashion typical to his understanding of Australian history: “Australia has produced some great talkback broadcasters, and he was top of the pops.” Evidently dazzled, former deputy leader of the Nationals, Barnaby Joyce, pumped up a fantasy of a man, one who “gave voice to people”, giving them “hope that they would be listened to”. Erroneously, he confused Laws fickle radio rants with the sort of journalism that should hold the powerful to account. “The job of the fourth estate is to stand up against [the] powerful, and I think that’s what he did.” Only part of that sentence is true.
The central case in any prosecution brief against Laws will always be the seamless (or so he thought) change from being a populist bank basher celebrating the oppressed yokels to an ardent advocate for banksters. The transformation was not a prolonged, meditative agony, the Trotskyite intellectual turned rabid neo-conservative, or the reflective vegan wondering, after a good stint in the vegetable patch, whether a steak with piquant sauce had any merit. This was a change induced by the exchange of cash for favours. As a man with no distinct political views or ideology, self-enrichment was the only logical pursuit.
The matter was unearthed by the ABC’s Media Watch in 1999, that most vigilant of programs. Laws’s defence was that he had been better educated about the banking industry once Tony Aveling of the Australian Bankers’ Association set him straight. But Media Watch had received documents from the same association implying that Laws changed his views after being offered hefty sums of money that his team had solicited. The “cash for comment” scandal was born.
The Australian Broadcasting Authority later engaged the matter in 1999, in what came to be known as the Commercial Radio Inquiry. The sponsorship agreements of both Laws and that other, even less savoury shock jock, Alan Jones, were scrutinised. Laws, for instance, received a lucrative package of remuneration and VIP hospitality from Sydney’s Star City casino in exchange for not attacking the gambling industry.
Phillip Adams, former broadcaster and host of Radio National’s Late Night Life, did remind readers of The Australian that Laws was prone to breach all sorts of standards at a station that promoted itself as “radio-active 2UE”. He worried the female staff; he habitually plagiarised. With consistency, he bullied and harangued. In 2004, for instance, Laws was found by the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal to have made comments the previous year capable of vilifying and inciting hatred of gay men. An out-of-court settlement involving Laws and fellow Radio 2UE presenter Steve Price, iced over by an apology and a $10,000 donation to the HIV-AIDS charity the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation, followed.
But undisclosed relationships between sponsors wishing to buy favours on the airways persisted, leading to consistent violations of the Broadcasting Service Act. Payola Laws could never resist. According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, he breached the Act no fewer than 13 times between October and November 2007 in failing to disclose his commercial arrangements with the relevant sponsor.
The nature of such transgressions for Laws was inconsequential. He remained a moral pygmy. All he was accused of, he told ABC journalist Leigh Sales in a 2012 interview, was “being excessively loyal to my sponsors, and I’m rather proud of that”. A life of bought bombast and purchased opinions was waved away with mirth and bonhomie by thespian, admirer, and eulogiser-in-chief, Russell Crowe. Admitting that he and Laws were “quite often on opposite sides of any issue”, the Hollywood bruiser could still joke that the eulogy was “just like ‘cash for comments’ but less obvious”. The late broadcaster, now in the afterlife, may well have chuckled at that point.
The post Payola Laws: The Gilding of Golden Tonsils first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.