Xtra News Community 2
March 29, 2024, 06:15:20 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”

Pages: 1 ... 47 48 49 50 51 [52] 53 54 55   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Some reading for the “anti-warmalists” and “climate-change deniers”  (Read 36173 times)
0 Members and 4 Guests are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #1275 on: August 18, 2019, 02:03:26 pm »


from the Sunday Star-Times…

The rabble over The Ditch

No-one should be shocked by the ravings of Alan Jones.

By FINDLAY MACDONALD | 5:00AM — Sunday, 18 August 2019

Alan Jones has stepped up his criticism of PM Jacinda Ardern, labelling her “gormless” over her climate change policy. — Photographs: Getty Images.
Alan Jones has stepped up his criticism of PM Jacinda Ardern, labelling her “gormless” over her climate change policy.
 — Photographs: Getty Images.


ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of living in New Zealand rather than Australia is that you rarely have to think about Alan Jones.

Last week was an exception, largely because our media find irresistible any mention of New Zealand by a foreign celebrity, even one as ludicrous and discredited as the former Wallabies coach-turned-talkback rabble-rouser.

For the record, Jones treated his breakfast radio audience on Sydney's 2GB to a typically foam-flecked rant about Jacinda Ardern's suggestion that Australia would have to “answer to the Pacific over climate change”.

Jones wondered whether Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had been briefed to “shove a sock down her throat”, called her a “lightweight” and a “clown”, said she should “shut up”, and generally confirmed what everyone knows already — that he's a reactionary blowhard without an off switch.

In nearly every report of his semi-coherent diatribe Jones was described as a “shock jock” (or by one wag, a “sock jock”).

It's an easy shorthand, but it's really not that accurate — no one is shocked any more by the illiberal mental dandruff that sprinkles from his head.

It might play well with the professionally offended warriors of wokeness on Twitter to pretend outrage, but that's just oxygen to a life-form such as Jones, which thrives on being perceived as the enemy of political correctness.

So, Jones's intemperate gibbering received entirely too much coverage here, a reminder perhaps that cultural cringe is slow to die this side of the ditch.


Alan Jones has been slapped on the wrist by ACMA more than any other broadcaster this decade. — Photograph: Jenny Evans.
Alan Jones has been slapped on the wrist by ACMA more than any other broadcaster this decade.
 — Photograph: Jenny Evans.


In Australia it wasn't such big news, inured as its long-suffering citizenry is to the kind of ad hominem raving that passes for conservative opinion in some quarters.

In the end Jones issued an apology — by calling in live to his own radio station, of course.

Whether he was truly contrite or simply heading off calls for an advertising boycott is impossible to say. But it reinforces the impression that words don't particularly matter to motormouths like Jones, they are simply deployed in the moment for maximum impact or to mitigate the consequences of their original utterance.

In 1999 it was revealed that Jones and fellow broadcaster John Laws had indeed been selling their opinions for corporate bucks in the so-called “cash for comment” scandal.

Neither's career was unduly affected; their words worth millions, their values as free as the air into which they are breathed.

Laws retired in 2007, leaving Jones in a league of his own. Go back only a couple of electoral cycles and he was laughing that then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard's recently deceased father had “died of shame” and that she should be “put into a chaff bag and thrown into the sea”.


Alan Jones once said that former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard's father had died of shame. — Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images.
Alan Jones once said that former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard's father had died of shame.
 — Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images.


Before that he was found by the Australian media watchdog to have made comments before the infamous Cronulla riots in Sydney that were “likely to encourage violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern backgrounds on the basis of ethnicity”.

And at the heart of Jones' attack on Ardern was his apparent belief that climate change science is a hoax.

In this he most resembles our own talkback veteran Leighton Smith, who also stands bravely apart from global scientific consensus.

In truth, though, we have no equivalent in New Zealand to the right wing opinion mill that grinds out inflammatory soundbites and column inches in Australia.

Yes, Mike Hosking, Duncan Garner, Paul Henry and the late Paul Holmes have all flirted occasionally with fuelling the ratings fire with combustible garbage.


Paul Henry had a history of making controversial comments, but it pales in comparison to Alan Jones. — Photograph: Lawrence Smith.
Paul Henry had a history of making controversial comments, but it pales in comparison to Alan Jones.
 — Photograph: Lawrence Smith.


But next to Jones and his peers — Laws, Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, Kyle Sandilands or ex-pat Kiwi Derryn “the human headline” Hinch — our lot look like a bunch of choirboys.

That's partly a measure of more general cultural differences. New Zealanders just aren't as brash, as confrontational or (let's be honest) as good at insults as their neighbours.

And without getting into a debate about our supposedly more progressive social and racial record, there's little doubt you can get away with saying stuff in Australia that you wouldn't here, at least with the mic switched on.

Theirs' is a country, remember, where Pauline Hanson's idiotic motion that “it's okay to be white” was only narrowly defeated in the Senate.

With political dog whistles like that coming from the top is it any wonder sections of the mass media wag their tails?

There is a theory that this weaponising of opinion by populist broadcasters such as Jones is really a calculated strategy: play to a redneck base with bigotry and vulgarity, garner mainstream attention by being outrageous, and thus stay relevant and rating.

In which case, you have to wonder why we insist on taking the bait.

Perhaps the unpalatable truth is that by my writing this and you reading it, Alan Jones has already proved his point.


__________________________________________________________________________

Finlay Macdonald is a New Zealand journalist, editor, publisher and broadcaster. He is best known for editing the New Zealand Listener. Macdonald lives in Auckland with his partner, media executive Carol Hirschfeld. They have two children, Will and Rosa. His father was the late journalist Iain Macdonald.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Malcolm Turnbull blasts ‘misogynist’ Alan Jones over his Jacinda Ardern comments

 • Alan Jones attacks 'hypocrite' Jacinda Ardern again as climate change row escalates

 • Who is this outrageous Australian shockjock Alan Jones?

 • Australian PM slams Alan Jones' call to ‘shove a sock down throat’ of Jacinda Ardern


https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/115052547/noone-should-be-shocked-by-the-ravings-of-alan-jones
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Pages: 1 ... 47 48 49 50 51 [52] 53 54 55   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.053 seconds with 16 queries.