The Last Of The Shock Jocks (Naked City)

Enough has already been said about the Kyle Sandilands/Jackie Henderson radio divorce, with the voracious 140kg Kyle devouring more of the 24-hour news cycle than the omnipresent Donald Trump – of whom he admits to being a great admirer.

How this rather bitter pop culture poo fight plays out is anybody’s guess but not surprisingly some commentators are forecasting the end of the ‘shock jock’, as we know it here in Australia.

Elsewhere in the world a similar scenario is playing out, with theatrically offensive and deliberately vulgar radio presenters losing their original shock value. In the US, it was Howard Stern who set the gold standard for vile and often indecent content.

Throughout the 90s he boosted his ratings with an avalanche of crude and nasty comments. A day after the Columbine High School shooting for example, he mocked the entire incident with cheap sexualised banter about the victims.

These days Stern is still on the air, a shadow of his once villainous self. He’s been joined by a new much tamer breed of loudmouths in Johnny Dare, Bubba The Love Sponge and Billy Madison, none of whom have yet to reach his former level of crassness. With the internet now open slather for all manner of bigoted, racist, ultra conservative and conspiratorial chitter chat, it’s becoming much harder for these opinionated radio jocks to cook up the controversy.

Here in Sydney the shock jock title has been loosely applied to a number of radio spruikers including John Laws, Ray Hadley, Alan Jones and of course the current ratings supremo, Sandilands. None have really equalled the notoriety of a Howard Stern or Bubba The Love Sponge but a few have come dangerously close.

It was the introduction of talkback radio in 1967 that opened the airwaves to a kind of pseudo-democracy. Hard to believe, but the live broadcasting of phone conservations was previously deemed illegal. With the band lifted, the listeners supposedly now had their say, as they chatted to a cluster of highly domineering jocks, many who wielded great political influence.

The callers were of course well-screened beforehand, and the dump button was always on hand with a 7–10 second delay. No chance of you getting straight onto the ‘golden tonsils’ of Lawsie to tell him he was a pompous bullshitting arsehole. It was little wonder most of the callers sounded like sycophants of the demagogues behind the microphones.

Perhaps the most powerful of the Sydney radio presenters was Alan Jones, who for decades through the 90s and 2000s reigned as Australia’s highest paid and most listened to talkback jock. His political supporters, and frequent callers, ranged from Pauline Hanson through to John Howard and Scott Morrison. Their support was largely unqualified, despite Jones’ frequent outburst of bigotry and attacks on politicians such as Julia Gillard and New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. In 2019 he viciously went after Ardern saying that she should have “a sock shoved down in her throat”. He also dropped the n-word on air, and branded people of Middle Eastern descent as ‘grubs’ and ‘vermin’ following the 2005 Cronulla riots. Regardless of what he said, he was a vote winner.

Although 85, Jones may well have been on the air today, were it not for his arrest in November 2024, charged with a string of sexual assaults involving young men between 2003 and 2020.

The trial is set down for August of this year and Jones will plead not guilty, labelling all the charges as baseless. Needless to say he has employed a formidable team of lawyers who have already indicated they may apply for a stay of proceedings. The legal bunfight could well drag on for months with the octogenarian’s longevity and state of health likely to become a factor.

It will be interesting to see whether Jones’ former avid supporters stand by him during his upcoming legal battle. As far as I know Pauline Hanson has yet to comment on the charges Jones is facing, nor have his other former political supporters like Scott Morrison and John Howard. Hanson in particular has previously enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship with Jones, often sharing common right-wing beliefs on air. He also championed her innocence when she was jailed in 2003 for alleged electoral fraud.

There’s bound to be huge media focus on how the Sandilands and Jones sagas pan out. One thing is for sure – the term ‘shock jock’ is now an anachronism and hopefully a phenomenon we won’t see recurring. There’s far more to be shocked about in the world today than a rash of crude babble with references to male and female genitalia.

What’s really shocking is that somebody would be paid upwards of $15 million a year to churn out this garbage.