And Virginia Trioli hasn’t covered herself in glory either. Comment from Peter Saxon

It’s been a while since Alan Jones has made the headlines for his intemperate comments about the cause of Julia Gillard’s father’s death. But today’s performance is likely to break the drought and put him back in the news.

In Boston, authorities are sifting through the rubble and the body parts to piece together fragmented clues in the hope of tracking down the perpetrator/s. It could be days. It could be months or never.

Meanwhile, here on the flip side of the planet, Alan Jones, from his cosy studio at 2GB already knows who to blame – or at least smear. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he told the audience on Channel 7’s Sunrise, “if this was a conspiracy amongst students, left-wing radical students in Boston.”

On it’s own, this statement is wildly speculative and bordering on irresponsible given that no information exists to support it. But that’s beside the point.

Having said that, Jones neatly segues into, “And I think we have to think also very seriously here about our own student numbers. We’re very keen to have foreign students pay the way of universities in this country without a lot of discernment about who comes in.”

So now left wing students (haven’t they always been until they join the establishment?) wherever they go to uni are now all suspect terrorists. The connection is breathtaking in its audacity. You take a tragedy on the other side of the planet and you use it to push your own local agenda with no regard to any actual facts that may or may not be in evidence.

For masters of information manipulation like Alan Jones the marvelous thing about a catastrophe of this nature is that until the authorities name a genuine suspect, you can insert whoever you like  (or don’t like) as your preferred culprit. Maybe it was boat people or those tree huggers from the Greens. Personally, I’d like to think it was my ex-wife, but it would be disrespectful to the victims for me to indulge such fantasies.

However, Jones isn’t the only presenter happy to exploit a tragedy in this way. On the other side of the political divide is the ABC’s Virginia Trioli who, on seeing the blanket coverage of the bombing unfold, couldn’t help but comment, “it seems to me where we are overly focusing on what happens to rich white people in the West.”

There is nothing wrong with initiating a discussion about whether Australian news outlets go overboard in covering murderous acts in predominantly white affluent countries while virtually ignoring equally horrendous crimes that are regular occurrences in other, less privileged parts of the world. In fact, there is a lot of truth in what she says. And there are well-founded arguments for it. But it is a discussion for another time.

Nor is there anything wrong with Alan Jones questioning the security checks that are done on overseas students. But in both cases their timing and shameless exploitation of an event that killed three (so far) and maimed many more, in my opinion, is appalling.

Peter Saxon