Alan Jones: from kingmaker to cop car

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Few people in the media – or anywhere else, for that matter – have held the kind of power Alan Jones exerted when he was king of Sydney talkback radio. As Denis Muller writes, prime ministers and premiers of all political stripes worked hard to curry favour with him, and in the early 2000s, he even became "a kind of on-air policy-maker" for the NSW government.

That power was so great that nothing seemed to diminish it. Not the "cash for comment" scandal, nor the outrage in 2011 when he suggested the prime minister, Julia Gillard, should be dumped at sea in a chaff bag.

But that all changed this week, when Jones was charged with 24 sexual offences against eight males and the following day was charged with two more offences involving a ninth. Through his lawyers, Jones has denied the charges. How this very Sydney story might play out will be closely watched in the coming months.

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Thanks to all of this week's contributors including (but not limited to): Denis Muller University of Melbourne Curtin University Annette Greenhow, PhD Justin Keogh Bond University Thami Croeser RMIT University Penni Russon Monash University Charles Darwin University Charlotte Dunn Jayne Knight University of Tasmania Michelle Grattan Ian Musgrave University of Adelaide John Quiggin The University of Queensland John Richardson The Australian National University Leonora Risse University of Canberra Andrew Norton Katharine Kemp UNSW Gabriel M. Pontes Professor Dominic O'Sullivan, Hon FRSNZ Charles Sturt University Vaughan Cruickshank Brendon Hyndman

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