Psychosexual treatment of Alan Jones relies on rumours

In Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones, Chris Masters has a curious way of attempting to prove a point. For example, he tells the reader that "more than one wife of a former boarding-school boy has been known to wonder about the origin of her husband's habit of sleeping with his hands crossed over his genitals".

This fear of the predator, he says, explains why some fathers might have been concerned when, on a school football tour, Alan Jones sent a boy out to buy toothpaste for him. Or that he would disappear from social functions with two of the boys - and the team's soiled football gear - to find the nearest laundrette.

This approach permeates Jonestown, an unprecedented intrusion into a public figure's private life. Masters would know that the media's ethical codes only allow this in exceptional circumstances, where this is clearly in the public interest. British defence minister John Profumo's affair with Christine Keeler was one, but only because she was also involved with the Soviet naval attache.

Through a bizarre new genre, the psychosexual biography, Masters claims to have found the silver bullet that allows him to delve, with impunity, into Jones's private life.

He says Jones's constant flaying of the rich and powerful is no public service. Instead, this results from his repression of his sexuality, aggravated by a definable personality disorder, a kind of schizophrenia. This repression leads to pain, which Jones alleviates through the "on-air" button, which acts as a self-medicating device. He came to this role as "a virus in search of a host". (I am not making this up.)

Masters ignores the fact that boys and young men were once subject to a most rigorous discipline. Fathers, teachers, coaches, and non-commissioned officers tended to be stern and serious. Their style today would provoke a flood of complaints of harassment or bullying. They expected obedience, not because of their repressed sexuality or some personality disorder, but because that was the way things were.

Some boys would perform better and were closer to their masters, who were then open to the accusation of favouritism. But when Jones follows this tradition, our soi-disant psychologist finds only psychosexual dysfunction. Even when Jones is spectacularly successful, Masters finds, against all the evidence, that he is ill-disciplined and his research poor.

This psychoanalysis is as useless - and as dangerous - as an appendectomy performed by a lawyer. Employing this to circumvent core journalistic ethics is worse than the most blatant form of tax evasion. If Jonestown lowers media standards, even the momentarily newsworthy may now find that a psychosexual investigative journalist will publish not only fact but also rumour, hearsay and yes, falsehood, about their private life from their earliest years.

As US author Kitty Kelley has demonstrated, the prurient are interested in everything, except good manners and works, lifelong monogamy or the missionary position. Not many will be able to stand up to this as well as Jones has these four long years.

It is ironical that Masters claims Jones does not have the journalist's grounding in identifying fact and essaying balance: Masters himself struggles in both areas. There are far too many unattributed assertions, too much gossip and too many gratuitous comments.

Balance seems to be present where a defamation lawyer might counsel it, but not always where responsible journalism requires it. For example, he relies on an unfavourable valedictory at Sydney's King's School that first saw the light of day on Four Corners: I understand the headmaster cannot recall it. But he ignores the favourable one in the school journal. He says that lawyer Tim Barton worked for Jones before being involved on the Kalajzich case. Why did he not mention Barton's express denial made directly to him?

His "proof" of Jones's sexuality stoops at times to the level you would expect from a carload of hooligans roaring down Oxford Street. We are told of occasions when Jones wore a pink shirt, once with a powder-blue jacket; when he wore flared pants and an orange cravat; and how infuriated he was when given pink tissues. You can almost feel Masters nudging you.

When schools put on plays in the years when Jones was a student, boys normally took all the roles: Masters uses this to refer to Jones's "talent for putting on a skirt".

When Jones buys a new house in Chippendale near the University of Sydney, Masters, almost winking at the reader, makes the appalling observation that this is "closer, too, to some of Sydney's gay beats".

Masters seems to think that being aware of beauty in your own sex is abnormal. So Jones doesn't just look at young men, he invariably "ogles" them, spends far too much time with them and, of course, plays favourites.

Underlying all this is a constant suggestion of impropriety. But after he has recounted one salacious titbit or another, Masters is forced to admit that there is no evidence of any impropriety. On one occasion, he limits this to "physical impropriety", in another to "no clear evidence".

Nowhere does he concede that if his judgment of Jones's sexuality were correct, this abstinence would be a sign of considerable moral strength, not "psychosexual" weakness.

Masters relies too much on an "army of secret helpers" who are obviously too cowardly to let their names go forward. He provides no evidence at all about some letter allegedly found by someone in some boy's desk at King's. Nor is Masters put off by mere rumour.

An egregious example begins: "Jones, it was said, was seen in the back seat of his car kissing and cuddling" a well-known footballer, whom Masters unfairly names. Masters waits until the second paragraph after this to admit that this gossip "as best I can tell, appears baseless".

The story is obviously without foundation. So why did Masters give it credibility in the way he introduced it, in the reluctance with which he discounts it, and in using it at all?

Masters seems to think only homosexual men use public lavatories. Doesn't he know that some police were once so enthusiastic about entrapment that straight men were at times also arrested? To avoid publicity, they were often persuaded to plead guilty to a lesser charge.

In a chapter about the fact that the London police, having arrested Jones, were unable to proceed because they had no evidence whatsoever, Masters cannot resist a gratuitous observation. Jones, he says, tried to "defeat common sense by asking everyone to join him in his denial".

Jones asked nothing of the sort. Nobody is under any obligation, legal or moral, to give chapter and verse about their private lives, so why should Jones? Master doesn't. But even on this, Masters has to accuse Jones of bad faith. Rather than wanting to protect his privacy, he says Jones is more concerned about protecting "a dishonest power base".

Masters goes overboard when he declares that Jones is a "fraud at work", "hypocritical", and "exhibiting a fundamental lack of beliefs" and "emptiness". That is not the view of Jones's listeners, who see him as a living embodiment of the adage "comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable".

Any objective assessment would find that he is extraordinarily effective, and that he has strong beliefs that cannot be stereotyped as typically conservative. A true renaissance man, Jones is dedicated and generous. His great fault, in Masters' eyes, is that he is far too effective.

Masters is entitled to investigate and challenge Jones's influence and role, but he is not entitled to intrude into his private life based on purloined correspondence, amateur psychoanalysis and irresponsible journalism. No wonder the ABC board wrote off the public money poured into this vengeful project by the nomenklatura.

The result is no credit to its author, its publishers and the two newspapers that featured the most salacious bits.