Time to ask some searching questions, I think. Why has the ABC suddenly
decided NOT to publish Jonestown, the biography of Alan Jones, written
by the Four Corners reporter Chris Masters?

Are they scared that Jones is a powerful figure with powerful
friends? Is the ABC Board now so heavily stacked with right-wing
stooges that it was seeking to protect a political fellow traveller?

But the big question is: what is there to hide? Chris Masters is the
ABC’s most respected investigative reporter. His book is a biography of
Alan Jones’s stellar career, from humble
beginnings… school-teaching… his life in politics with Malcolm
Fraser… Jones’s undoubted success as a football coach… and then, of
course, the brilliant career in the media.

By any standard it’s a fascinating story. Jones is now wealthy,
influential, powerful… a close friend of the Prime Minister and the
late Kerry Packer and so on. So what is there to hide? Is it the
cash-for-comment scandal a few years ago, where Alan Jones was found to
have quietly taken hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from
people whose cause, or business interests, he was spruiking on
radio? Is that what the ABC and Jones are worried about?

Or is it that Jonestown alleges that Alan Jones is gay or
has had gay
relationships? As I understand it – and I’ve not read the book – I
believe it details a number of gay s-xual encounters Jones was
allegedly involved in. Jonestown also, I understand,
touches on an incident some time ago in a public toilet in London where
Alan Jones was charged with an offence (but was later found to have no
case to answer.)

So is that why the ABC Board has tried to stop the book? Allegations
that Alan Jones is gay? It’s not a crime to be gay, any more than it’s
a crime to be rich and powerful. And, as we’ve heard, the ABC
lawyers cleared the book for publication. So I think the ABC Board
should explain why it has already spent so much public money on a book
that it will not now publish.