Laws describes his job as ‘just going in there, playing that ridiculous theme [song], saying, “Hello, world”, giving a bit of useless information and talking to a whole bunch of people’. An ‘entertainer’ rather than a journalist, Laws is fond of mocking the ‘meeja’. Still. he’s proved a dab hand at manipulating the media since sitting down behind his golden microphone on that Wednesday morning. First, he made sure a Channel Nine crew was at 2UE to film him reading out a 2000-word statement about being present at a dinner party in November 2000 when Jones allegedly boasted that he had instructed Prime Minister John Howard to reappoint Flint as chairman of the ABA in return for Jones’s support at the next election. (Ironically, at the time the story broke, Howard is said to have been meeting with Nine executives.)

After talking further to the assembled pack about ‘the interesting little troika’, Laws headed off to Otto Ristorante to have lunch with Fordham, who had hosted the dinner in question. (Back in 1999, Laws was often to be found at another waterfront restaurant, Catalina; by becoming part-owner of the celebrity magnet Otto, he is at least able to share in any of the benefits resulting from free publicity.) Otto was soon besieged by journalists and photographers, including Barry, who had once been Laws’s and Jones’s bête noire but was now greeted like an old friend.

The other players also had to grapple with how to respond to Laws’s statement. 2GB, in which Alan Jones has a twenty per cent stake, failed even to mention the story in its news bulletins before Jones elected to be interviewed by the afternoon host, Chris Smith. During the quiescent interview Jones agreed that he had been at the dinner but doubted whether he had ever had a conversation with Howard about Flint. One 2GB source told the SMH’s Sue Javes that the questions as well as the answers were dictated by Jones.

Over the next few days, Jones used his regular spot on the Today Show to defend himself, Howard was forced to issue increasingly firm denials of Laws’s allegations, Flint wrote an article for The Australian criticising Media Watch for ‘the longest sulk in Australian history’, the ABA board held a meeting at which the chairman was said to have expressed ‘regret’ that his letters to Jones were not disclosed at the time of the 2UE hearing in 1999, and Commercial Radio Australia kept quiet. But Laws was in full flight, appearing twice on A Current Affair as well as on the 7.30 Report, in interviews with 2UE’s John Stanley and Nova’s comic duo Merrick and Rosso, and, on Monday 3 May, on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. He mastered the soundbite, declaring that he had always said that his only difference with Jones was religious: ‘I refuse to treat him like God.’

Laws won kudos by admitting that his statement was the result of ‘sour grapes’ because he had been put through hell by the ABA in 1999 and he and 2UE had recently been found guilty of failing properly to disclose his arrangements with Telstra, while Jones had escaped sanction on the technical ground that Telstra’s arrangement was with Macquarie Radio. Well, yes, but there are many other reasons why Laws would choose to lash out at Jones now. When Jones moved from 2UE to 2GB in 2002, he obtained equity in Macquarie Radio, something Laws, for all his success and wealth seems never to have countenanced; in 2003, his fiftieth year in broadcasting, the Golden Tonsils had to endure reports and headlines about ignominious ratings results; on 7 April 2004 Rupert Murdoch told Jones, ‘Well, look at the power of radio, look at your power, you’ve got more power than I have at the moment’; on April 26, Media Watch revealed that Telstra was paying Macquarie Radio some $1.2 million to sponsor Jones’s breakfast show, while Laws was receiving only (my emphasis) $300 000.

Denton did suggest that surely Laws was partly motivated by Jones taking the number-one crown from 2UE. He also pointed out that Laws seemed to pay closer attention to Jones than he liked to admit, and remarked on the irony of Laws emerging as a fan of Media Watch. However, Denton did not make the most of his opportunity to record the first in-depth interview with Laws since the story broke; Laws was not subjected to the forensic dissection of his commercial practice that had so enraged Peter Foster earlier in the year. Instead, viewers were treated to coy speculation about people being ‘outed’, Denton’s assertion that Jones ‘doesn’t have half your skills’ (who was Laws to disagree?) and a question about what frightens Laws. Interestingly, while hosting the Triple M breakfast show in 1999, Denton had said of the cash for comment allegations: ‘I think it severely damages John Laws’s image, because he sells ... [himself as] ... a man who thinks for himself and speaks his mind. Well, does he?’

Enough Rope’s host should have been able to dispute Laws’s curious opening gambit when he said that he had accused Jones of telling, rather than instructing, Howard to reappoint Flint. The word ‘instructed’ was there for all to hear and see in Laws’s provocative statement. But I suppose Denton couldn’t really be expected to pick up on the chutzpah of this comment by Laws: ‘I heard a wonderful story about Professor Flint at Bathurst. Did you read that? A nice man wrote it in the newspaper.’ That ‘nice man’ is Richard Ackland, who in his SMH column on April 30 relayed a story about the pompous Flint emerging from a cupboard in a Bathurst motel to preside over a licence hearing. Laws wasn’t such a fan of Ackland when the latter hosted Media Watch, as this comment from his show on 22 October 1999 illustrates: ‘So, Richard Ackland. Who’s going to watch Media Watch? You deliberately contorted a tape for your own gain and for my destruction.’

By the end of Enough Rope, the canonisation of Laws was all but complete. Laws had reached a whole new audience, and opinion polls showed most people believed what he had said about Jones. The only real irritants were sections of the ABC.

Those who remember Laws’s interview with Monica Attard in September 2003 or heard his reaction to the 7.30 Report’s consideration of Telstra’s ethics on 4 May 2004 would know how furiously Laws reacts to criticism of his commercial arrangements. At the end of the show, Kerry O’Brien had corrected a suggestion that Laws’s stablemate, Mike Carlton, had an undisclosed arrangement with another telco. On May 5 the smile disappeared from Laws’s face as he savaged O’Brien (whom he had happily agreed to be interviewed by the previous week), saying that O’Brien had never approached him to ask for details of his sponsorship arrangement and had never apologised to him; but of course, Laws sneered, that was because Carlton is a real journalist who once worked for the ABC. Things descended even further into farce the next morning, when Laws said that Carlton was trying to arrange for them to have lunch with O’Brien. At Otto, presumably.

Beneath the hypocrisy, hysteria and hilarity of this episode lie some fundamental issues, including the nexus between leading media figures and politicians. If Jones did indeed say what he is alleged to have said, and was engaged in more than idle boasting, this would not be the first time that an Australian media identity has threatened a political party. While speculation continues about the reasons for the Fairfax company’s barracking for the ALP in 1961, and Rupert Murdoch and Gough Whitlam’s dramatic falling-out in 1975, at least one explicit threat from an Australian media proprietor has survived. In 1948, a year out from an election, Frank Packer complained to Prime Minister Chifley about newsprint restrictions, an issue even less sexy than the ABA:

[I]f it is your Government’s intention to unfairly penalise the ‘Women’s Weekly’ by refusing it the same privileges as you are now granting to other established publishing houses ... then we have no alternative but to most forcibly explain the situation to our 700,000 women readers ... This is not intended as any threat, but I do not want you to reproach me and say we have turned the ‘Women’s Weekly’ into a political sheet ...

And yet Laws’s statement was not quite the ‘bombshell’ it was said to be. There is plenty of evidence showing that Jones, a one-time Liberal candidate, is more of an ideologue than Laws has ever been: in 2000 the SMH revealed details of the flood of letters Jones writes to politicians in New South Wales and elsewhere; Andrew West and Rachel Morris’s Bob Carr (2003) showed how Carr used, but then fell foul of, Jones; Jones has been, and continues to be, a speaker at Liberal Party functions. Murdoch’s comment on Jones’s power, for all its disingenuousness, adds weight to an argument that the major talkback hosts are now at least as important in political discourse as Australian media barons have traditionally been.

Even if there is little basis to the story about Jones and Howard, Flint’s position is hopelessly compromised by the revelations about his correspondence with Jones. The ABA and its predecessors, which date back to 1948, have been more advisory than punitive, and have been criticised always, for being little more than irritants to commercial broadcasters and, often, for being tools of the government of the day. Flint has undoubtedly done severe damage to the ABA, for he has repeatedly shown himself to be incapable of separating his personal  views from his statutory responsibilities. In 1999 he stepped down from the 2UE inquiry after he had conducted an interview with Laws about the republican debate and 150 members of the ABA had passed a vote of no confidence in their chairman; in 2001 he couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t accept that the views he expressed in a conference paper entitled ‘How the News Is Made in Australia’ were those of a private citizen. Nor did Flint see a problem with publishing a book, The Twilight of the Elites (2003), with a foreword by Tony Abbott, which declared that most Australian journalists and commentators were élites who were out of touch with the average Australian, and criticised them for, among other things, ignoring signs of trouble in the insurance industry and supporting free trade. Why should this really worry the Howard government, which has done so much to debauch standards of ministerial responsibility and bureaucratic independence?

And yet Labor should really be pleased that, at the time of going to press, its calls for Flint’s resignation before his term expires in October have not been heeded. Instead the government has announced that the ABA will be merged with the Australian Communications Authority. If Labor wins the election later in the year, it will be able to make its own appointment. In the event of re-election, the Coalition would be free but, surely, not brazen enough to appoint Flint as head of the new body.

Ironically (there’s that word again), just days before Laws’s outburst, Flint presided over the auction of two new FM radio licences, in Sydney and Brisbane, and another is pending in Melbourne. Unless these stations somehow manage to increase radio’s total audience, that can only serve to decrease the market share of the existing players. But don’t expect Howard to stop looking to Jones to spread his message in Sydney, or to boycott Laws’s nationally networked programme. any time soon.