I’ve seen a lot of dodgy reporting since I started writing about the media business, but you’d have to look long and hard to find something as quietly depressing as this.
Here’s the short version: prankster Robert Popper – author of the very funny Timewaster Diaries – calls the LBC radio station to join the “Gordon Brown is a bully” debate, in character as his Robin Cooper alter ego. He alleges that Gordon Brown once threw a tangerine in anger while visting a “laminating factory”. In a fit of fury he calls someone a “citric idiot”. Listen to the audio here:
Needless to say, at no point did LBC try to verify his claim – all we get is a weak admission at the end that Downing Street has “yet to corroborate” the tangerine story. That could have been the end of it, but no:
Maybe I’m over-reacting, maybe this doesn’t matter. The press has always been duped by pranksters and, hey, here’s another one. Big Deal.
But for me it does matter: we’re less than two months from an election and the Prime Minister is dealing with some fairly atrocious press at the moment. One more tangerine in the works won’t make the difference between defeat or an unlikely victory – but why should we believe newspapers when the work of a piss-take artist is reported as fact without any question? It’s another Flat Earth News story.
Even worse, this hasn’t just happened – The Sun and the Telegraph reported this one week ago: these stories are still sitting there unchanged, for all to see, with no hint to their complete untruth. As Journalism.co.uk founder John Thompson put it aptly earlier on: “This is the sort of thing mainstream media accuses the internet of uncritically propagating; reality is there is often more accountability online.”
News International – eventually – wants to charge us to read all its content online. The least it can do is make sure its news stories aren’t fictional.
Sidenote: Does anyone else think it’s strange that none of the commenters on the The Sun story have pointed this out?
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