Alan Fisher
Tangerinegate

At the height of the Gordon Brown bullying row, I tuned in to the London talk radio station, LBC. The host was taking a series of calls about the prime minister and his alleged bad temper. One call got through and it made me laugh. An earnest man explained that Gordon Brown had been touring his work, 'a lamination factory', had received a phone call and gone into a bad mood. So dark was the moment he threw a tangerine into one of the machines. To top off what had obviously been a bad day, he called one of the workers a 'citric idiot'. I laughed out loud. It was so clearly a hoax call, delivered in a wonderful deadpan style. The host, an excellent journalist, immediately said there was no corroboration but thanked the man for the call. I admired his restraint. He hadn't laughed.
     Watching a comedy show on Friday on the BBC, the host David Mitchell told his guests that Gordon Brown had lost his temper while touring a factory and had thrown a tangerine into a lamination machine. He was smart enough to add allegedly, but the line got a few laughs, as it should.
     From there, the tangerine incident grew legs, as we say in journalism. It was mentioned in a story in the Financial Times – an august and normally reliable organ – which, to be fair, eyed the story somewhat suspiciously. The Daily Telegraph carried the tale and even had the headline 'Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine'. Not perhaps the most imaginative headline, but it did tell the 'story'.
     I decided to do an online search. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn't a hoax. But then I found a website run by comedian Robert Popper. And not only did he admit to being behind the original call, he had recorded it and posted it on his website with silly drawings. It's actually quite fun.
     However, my search also revealed that a number of papers had picked up the story. The Sun carried a piece. It read: 'One of the factory workers told the Sun Mr Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine'. Brilliant! So a totally fictitious worker, at a totally made-up factory called the Sun (that's real enough) and told them all about an imaginary incident with a fictitious tangerine breaking a completely imaginary machine.
     Nowadays, this sort of thing is quickly picked up by what has become known quite sadly, as the blogosphere. Online social networking sites were talking about it, people were sending 'tweets' about it. They gave it a name. It predictably became known as #Tangerinegate (the hash tag lets people find it easily). The name stuck. People were talking about it.
     There are great pressures on journalists at the moment. There is a demand from their employers for more content, more often. In his memorable phrase, investigative journalist Nick Davies, has described how journalists are now involved in 'churnalism', turning press releases and media puff into stories which make the front page. The time to dig out original material (like the Scottish Review), check it out, develop lines of inquiry and present something fresh and original is simply disappearing.
     The next election is a very important one for Britain and the responsibility on journalists is to report it fairly, accurately and give the electors the information it needs to make an informed decision. That isn't a joke.

Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent