CONTROVERSIAL shock jock Alan Jones has been ordered to undergo ''factual accuracy'' training, and to use fact-checkers, in another damaging blow to his credibility.
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External trainers will conduct training sessions for Jones and other news and current affairs staff at 2GB. But their task could be a challenging one, with many leading journalism academics having been involved in the online ''Destroy the Joint'' campaign against Jones. That campaign led to droves of advertisers abandoning the show in the wake of Jones' offensive comments about the Prime Minister in relation to her late father.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority yesterday released a damning report on Jones' show, finding he breached broadcast rules by falsely claiming Australians contributed just ''1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air''.
''The percentage of man-made carbon dioxide Australia produces is 1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air,'' Jones told his listeners on March 15 last year. ''Nature produces nearly all the carbon dioxide in the air.''
2GB told the media regulator Jones had done his own research for the claims, but neither he nor the station could provide any evidence.
University of Melbourne climate change scientist David Karoly said Australians were in fact responsible for .45 per cent of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ''Obviously, we would much rather prefer that the comments of people like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt were, in fact, correct, so it is pleasing to get this ruling from ACMA,'' Dr Karoly said.
The radio station told ACMA Jones' claims should have been taken as commentary, because his show was neither news nor current affairs, but, ''overwhelmingly … the personal opinion and comment of Jones''.
But the authority said any ''ordinary, reasonable listener'' would have taken his claims to be fact.
The media authority said 2GB had ''some'' fact-checking and verification measures in place, but these had shortcomings in the case of Jones' show. ''The editorial pieces, the subject of the ACMA investigations, did not involve the wider production team.''
The station volunteered to ''pre-broadcast fact-checking by the program's executive producer of any material provided by non-media sources or third parties''.
