According to reports in the Sydney Morning Herald, Alan Jones has today apologised to Prime Minister Julia Gillard for the “unacceptable comments” he made last Saturday at a Young Liberals function in Sydney.
Since news of the comments first surfaced on Twitter last night, further information about the evening has come to light, including details that Jones both signed and placed a bid for a chaff-bag jacket in the SULC Auction – which is like a regular auction, but for nobs. For those of you playing along at home, the chaff-bag is a reference to comments Jones made earlier that Gillard should be “put in a chaff bag and thrown into the sea.” That’s a good one, right!? Just kidding. That is, in fact, a terrible one.
Jones told reporters at 2GB HQ this morning that “There are some days when you just have to concede and man up and say ‘you got it wrong’. And on this instance these are remarks which I should not have repeated. It was wrong to offer any impression that I might seem to diminish the grief that a daughter would feel for her father. I was taught by my father that if you are going to eat crow you should eat it while it’s hot and therefore I felt this matter should be addressed today.”
Not sure what all this eating of hot crows BS is about, because frankly that sounds disgusting, but at this point it’s starting to maybe sound like Jones is apologising for being a senseless crumb of a man, and that can only be a good thing. He continues:
“There seems to be a view that I have, that may not be shared, that it’s fair game to say anything about me… It does seem as though there is an attempt to quarantine Julia Gillard from all of that [criticism]. Today there are any number of [tweets] saying, “Well we hope the cancer comes back and we hope it kills you.‘”
Ugh. Just when you thought he might actually say The S Word (‘Sorry‘ not ‘Sexism Is My Sweetheart’) he stops short of full blown apology to take another jab @Everyone and turns the tables back to him. While it’s great that we’re all able to air our grievances with what Jones said and unite in outrage in 140 characters or less on forums like Twitter, resorting to the kinds of rock bottom slurs like ‘we hope the cancer comes back‘ are just as bad as the kind of thing that instigated this hot socio-political mess in the first place. Please, keep it clean, @Everyone. No death threats, I dont care who the person is; don’t ‘do a Jones.’ Let’s not make that a thing.
Seasoned media veteran Jones also said he thought he was speaking privately, at a private function where all the private, misogynistic things could be said in private, spiteful places that are private. Ha ha ha! Good one, Jonesy, you decrepit prune! Nothing is private – ask Kate Middleton.
Thankfully though – and this is probably the only thing we can be thankful for – Jones acknowledged it was naïve of him to assume there were no media present at the private function where all the private, spiteful things could be said by all the secretive bigots in private.
For someone so aware of what people are saying on Twitter, surely Jones should be privy to the fact that these days you’re never really in private; we are all part of the media. THE SOCIAL MEDIA. Until next time, my friends. Stop threatening to kill each other.
Photo by Scott Barbour for Getty Images.
