Enter the interviewer as defender.

Actually, even Laws seemed to find the exchange with his stablemate – Mangos is a fill-in presenter on 2UE, something he didn’t bother informing Sky viewers around Australia – too cosy. As the interview became ever more obsequious, Laws got twitchier, stroking his face, scratching his ear, rubbing his nose, picking his fingernails, running a heavily ringed finger around his mouth. He didn’t know where to look. Having a ‘senior anchorman’ dish up this sort of fluff fails to enhance Sky’s reputation for serious journalism.

The latest in a long line of Laws merchandise that includes trucking albums, volumes of homespun poetry and John Laws’ Book of Irreverent Logic is Australian history, packaged as There’s Always More to the Story (2004). Not surprisingly, the name of the book’s co-author, Christopher Stewart, appears in much smaller type. As Laws’s bio states, ‘John Laws is John Laws’. Stewart’s is more expansive, describing him as someone who has held ‘several senior executive positions in the private sector’. But there is no mention of the fact that Stewart was director of public affairs at the Australian Bankers’ Association, the organisation at the centre of the first ‘cash for comment’ inquiry. Media Watch revealed in 1999, and recently reminded us, that it was Stewart who came up with the idea of the ABA sponsoring an Australian history segment, subsequently called ‘The Whole Story’, for Laws’s programme, and prepared the script for a supposedly impromptu telephone call from the ABA’s chief executive to Laws.

Will this book’s seedy origins damage sales? Probably not, at least at my local bookstore, where piles of There’s Always More to the Story sit on the counter near the cash register. The book fits comfortably into the Laws schema, with its eighty inspiring tales of ‘heroism, perseverance, strange coincidence, genius and tragedy’. In his attack on Kressley, Laws said it would have been better to get a bunch of ‘fair dinkum Aussie blokes’ to judge the Melbourne Cup fashions. Speaking on behalf of ‘truck drivers, wharf labourers, freethinking red-blooded Australian men and me’, Laws remembered when ‘Australia was a land of proud, dedicated women and hard-drinking and hard-talking men. M-E-N, men.’ One Sydney Morning Herald letter-writer was amused to see Laws try to pass himself off as a blue-collar worker. Still, it’s a formula that has earned the broadcaster millions in dollars and in listeners.

Derryn Hinch probably wouldn’t have minded judging Melbourne Cup fillies, either, if his latest autobiography, The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch: How I Hit the Wall and Didn’t Bleed (2004), is any guide. The Hinch tome was released last April, in time, observed The Age, for Mother’s Day. Whether mothers and grandmothers found Hinch’s tales of masturbating, womanising and marrying too tawdry is a moot point. Perhaps Hinch comes across as a little too naughty?

He doesn’t write terribly well about his sexual exploits, lots of scores are settled, there is a good deal of self-aggrandisement to balance the self-criticism, and there’s no index. Black women are described as ‘exotic’; Kerry-Anne Kennerly is dismissed as the ‘television equivalent of the cockroach’; Hinch claims that, when he was appointed editor of the Sun at the age of thirty-one, he was the youngest-ever editor of a metropolitan Australian daily, when that title might belong to C.S. McNulty, who at twenty-six became editor of the Brisbane Truth in 1929. That was a long time ago, certainly, but Hinch is quite willing to accuse Gerald Stone of dashing into print to write television history to his own advantage.

One of the most irritating aspects of Hinch’s book is how it often presents him as a one-man band fighting against authority; Brian White put his executive position at 3AW on the line in 1983 to challenge the radio and television blackout on election news. What is even more remarkable is that The Fall and Rise recycles so much of Hinch’s earlier autobiography, That’s Life (1991). It is necessary to revisit the old anecdotes – some of them interesting and revealing – about his career in journalism and broadcasting, as well as his private life, before moving on to an account of his more recent hirings, firings and financial woes.

Like the Golden Tonsils, the Human Headline is a brand name and has his own website. Profiling ‘The Man Behind the Myth’, www.hinch.net features diet secrets, restaurant reviews and special offers for his other books (including novels, and diet and Scrabble guides). It also publishes his newspaper columns and daily radio editorials. The producers of Dancing with the Stars obviously agree that too much Hinch is never enough.

It might be gratifying to learn that some commercial broadcasters don’t just write books, but read them as well. Take Jim Ball, 2GB’s midnight-to-dawn presenter. The station’s website, completely without irony, describes Ball as ‘a lucky Australian in the lucky country’ who looks back on his country childhood through the ‘rose coloured rear-vision of life’. After some years out of the industry, Ball returned to radio in 1999, where he could combine his ‘lifelong passion for current affairs, news, views, writing and general observations … into a neat package’ for 2GB. While his polemical style provoked the ire of Graham Richardson, a one-time stablemate, Ball found his real groove in the aftermath of Tampa, September 11 and Bali, with boat people and militant Islam providing seemingly endless fodder. In 2002 Ball inspired some Sydney Muslims to write to 2GB sponsors asking if they were aware of the sort of programmes they were supporting.

On Ball’s personal website, jimball.com.au, listeners are encouraged to e-mail ‘Sydney’s No. 1 Overnight Talkback Personality’ with their thoughts. Clues to his own thinking are provided by the list of books and journals he often mentions on-air. Among the Australian titles are Quadrant, Flint’s The Twilight of the Élites (2002), Greg Clancy’s The People Smugglers (2003) and Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians (1998). Don’t expect to find Robert Manne, David Marr, or Mungo MacCallum (or ABR) here. The overseas titles include Yossef Bodansky’s Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (1999) and several about Islam. While Ball throws around references to these publications on-air, his website makes no attempt to engage with or assess them. The fullest endorsement is for Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995): ‘an excellent read by an ex-Muslim who has been featured twice on Radio National’s religion report.’ Curious, coming from a regular ABC basher. There are plenty of links to publishers’ and other websites; perhaps unwittingly, one takes you to a review critical of Bernard Goldberg’s Bias (2001), purporting to expose the liberal bias of the American media.

Ball’s is a very different beast from the first midnight-to-dawn programme in Australia (and probably the British empire), launched on 2UW in 1935. The idea had been to make the most of the session’s potential for an intimate bond with listeners by providing comfort and companionship, at one stage with the help of a resident parrot and horse. But Ball’s formula, bookended by the veteran late-night conspiracy theorist Brian Wilshire, and Jones at breakfast, has met with great success during the Howard era. In 2003 Ball overtook 2UE’s mellow John Kerr as the top-rating overnight host on Sydney radio. For Ball at least, nostalgia’s appeal has its limits.