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Undercover journalism is a form of journalism in which a reporter tries to infiltrate in a community by posing as somebody friendly to that community.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2008) |
Undercover journalism is a form of journalism in which a reporter tries to infiltrate in a community by posing as somebody friendly to that community.
The role of undercover journalism has become the topic of much debate as moral and ethical lines have been crossed. The nine elements of journalism as outlined in a book by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel are as follows:
As reporters have gone undercover some of these guidelines have been bent and broken in order to uphold others on the list. Undercover reporting has brought to light numerous atrocities throughout history, yet often these reporters sacrifice ethical and moral code in the process. [1]
While journalism aims to seek and report the truth, the ethics of how the truth is revealed should always be considered. If undercover journalism is an active lie to get the truth, then eventually trust can possibly be broken between reporters and the public. According to the Columbia Journalism Review , "Overreliance on sting operations and subterfuge can weaken the public's trust in the media and compromise journalists' claim to be truth-tellers. Undercover reporting can be a powerful tool, but it's one to be used cautiously: against only the most important targets, and even then only when accompanied by solid traditional reporting." [2] Undercover journalism exposes a lot of truths that would otherwise stay under the radar. In the 1990s, ABC Primetime Live went undercover to investigate rumors of Food Lion's unsanitary practices. According to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, "[j]ournalists should [...] [a]void undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” [3] Undercover journalism should be used scarcely and if it is used, then it should be done if there are no other options to get the information.[ citation needed ] It also should be accompanied by useful, interesting, and relevant information for the public.[ citation needed ]
Journalists who are famous for their undercover reports include:
Gloria Steinem's "A Bunny's Tale," which ran in two parts in Show magazine in 1963, exposed exploitative working conditions in New York's Playboy Club. Steinem applied for a position at the club under an assumed name, got the job, and spent 11 days as a Playboy Bunny. The piece made her a celebrity and is considered a foundational text of second-wave feminism. As Steinem later wrote, "My exposé of working in a Playboy Club has outlived all the Playboy Clubs, both here and abroad." [4]
James O'Keefe is an American conservative activist known for producing secretly recorded undercover audio and video encounters with figures and workers in academic, governmental, and social service organizations, in an effort to show abusive or allegedly illegal behavior by employees and/or representatives of those organizations. His ethics have been under scrutiny for manipulating these recordings in order to make subjects appear guilty of some wrongdoing.
Hunter S. Thompson was known for his undercover work reporting on the California-based motorcycle gang, the Hells Angels. His book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs , profiles the gang as Thompson spent roughly a year embedded among the Angels, during a time when their notoriety was at an all-time high.
Elizabeth Jane Cochran, writing under the pseudonym Nellie Bly, became known for her undercover work for the New York World , titled Ten Days in a Mad-House , when she checked herself into an insane asylum as a patient to report on cruelty and neglect. After ten days she was released and later went on to help a grand jury prosecute the mental ward.
Gunter Wallraff is a German journalist known for his undercover work, Ganz unten ("The lowest of the low"), on exposing the oppressive conditions faced by the immigrant workforce in Germany. He sought employment in German factories, pharmaceutical companies, and a wide array of odd jobs for roughly two years before publishing the book.
Anas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian investigative journalist born in the late 1970s. Anas is famous for utilizing his anonymity as a tool in his investigation arsenal (very few people have seen his face). A multimedia journalist who specializes in print media and documentary, Anas focuses on issues of human rights and anti-corruption in Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa. Anas has won critical acclaim for his work advocating for the right to not be held in human slavery or servitude and to have a standard of living in the event of an illness. His investigative works have won him worldwide acclaim with President Barack Obama highlighting his virtues in a speech during his 2009 visit to Ghana: "An independent press. A vibrant private sector. A civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy. We see that spirit in courageous journalists like Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who risked his life to report the truth." Anas has won over fourteen international awards for his investigative work. He was polled as the 5th most influential Ghanaian in 2011 by ETV, and named one of the "Most Influential Africans of the Year" by the New African Magazine, in December 2014. "Chameleon" a documentary about Anas' life and work by Ryan Mullins was premiered at the 2014 IDFA festival in Amsterdam.
Donal MacIntyre is an Irish journalist who went undercover to expose employment standards in the Adventure Sports industry following the Lyme Regis canoeing disaster. He also won an award for his undercover work exposing drug dealers and private security firms that work in collusion after living in character for eleven months.
Alex Dolan is a journalist and science teacher best known for her undercover work exposing poor student behavior in her British classroom for the filming of a Channel 4* documentary Undercover Teacher.
David Daleiden, an anti-abortion activist, secretly recorded conversations of officials at Planned Parenthood. Because Daleiden used a falsified driver's license to obtain access to the Planned Parenthood officials, he was indicted by a Houston grand jury for a second degree felony. [5]
Mazher Mahmood, the so-called "fake sheik", who won awards for his journalism and then was jailed for perjury.
Related to this are books such as Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, in which a white novelist dyed his skin black and traveled the southern United States, and Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent, a woman who dressed and passed herself off as a man. Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson is a fictional account of a gentile journalist who poses as a Jew to investigate antisemitism.
Playboy is an American men's lifestyle and entertainment magazine, formerly in print and online since 2020. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother.
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, racial injustice, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".
Günter Wallraff is a German writer and undercover journalist.
A Playboy Bunny is a cocktail waitress who works at a Playboy Club and selected through standardized training. Their costumes were made up of lingerie, inspired by the tuxedo-wearing Playboy rabbit mascot. This costume consisted of a strapless corset teddy, bunny ears, black sheer-to-waist pantyhose, a bow tie, a collar, cuffs and a fluffy cottontail. In more recent Playboy Clubs, such as Sin City that was re-opened in 2006, Playboy bunnies wore slightly altered costumes that were based on the original bunny suit.
In journalism, a source is a person, publication, or knowledge of other record or document that gives timely information. Outside journalism, sources are sometimes known as "news sources". Examples of sources include official records, publications or broadcasts, officials in government or business, organizations or corporations, witnesses of crime, accidents or other events, and people involved with or affected by a news event or issue.
Journalistic ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and good practice applicable to journalists. This subset of media ethics is known as journalism's professional "code of ethics" and the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements by professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), formerly known as Sigma Delta Chi, is the oldest organization representing journalists in the United States. It was established on April 17, 1909, at DePauw University, and its charter was designed by William Meharry Glenn.
Media ethics is the subdivision dealing with the specific ethical principles and standards of media, including broadcast media, film, theatre, the arts, print media and the internet. The field covers many varied and highly controversial topics, ranging from war journalism to Benetton ad campaigns.
The Sigma Delta Chi Awards are presented annually by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) for excellence in journalism. The SPJ states the purpose of the award is to promote "the free flow of information vital to a well-informed citizenry".
Raquel Rutledge is an Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative reporter working at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her investigations have uncovered government benefits fraud, public health, workplace safety issues, tax oversight failures, malfeasance in undercover federal law enforcement stings, life-threatening dangers of alcohol poisoning at resorts in Mexico, and a disproportionate fire risk faced by renters living in Milwaukee's most distressed neighborhoods.
The code of ethics in media was created by a suggestion from the 1947 Hutchins Commission. They suggested that newspapers, broadcasters and journalists had started to become more responsible for journalism and thought they should be held accountable.
Anas Aremeyaw Anas, better known as Anas, is a Ghanaian journalist born in the late 1970s. He utilizes his anonymity as a tool in his investigative journalism work. Anas is a politically non-aligned multimedia journalist who specializes in print media and documentaries. He focuses on issues of human rights and anti-corruption in Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa. In December 2015 Foreign Policy magazine named Anas one of 2015's leading global thinkers. In 2016 Anas had a "Best Journalist" award named after him by the Press Foundation in Ghana.
David Robert Daleiden is an American anti-abortion activist who worked for Live Action before founding the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress in 2013.
The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) is an anti-abortion organization founded by David Daleiden in 2013. The CMP is best known for producing undercover recordings that prompted a controversy over Planned Parenthood in 2015; CMP established a fake company to pose as buyers of fetal tissue and secretly recorded Planned Parenthood officials during meetings.
In 2015, an anti-abortion organization named the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released several videos that had been secretly recorded. Members of the CMP posed as representatives of a biotechnology company in order to gain access to both meetings with abortion providers and abortion facilities. The videos showed how abortion providers made fetal tissue available to researchers, although no problems were found with the legality of the process. All of the videos were found to be altered, according to analysis by Fusion GPS and its co-founder Glenn R. Simpson, a former investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The CMP disputed this finding, attributing the alterations to the editing out of "bathroom breaks and waiting periods". CMP had represented a longer version of the tapes as being "complete", as well as a shorter, edited version. The analysis by Fusion GPS concluded that the longer version was also edited, with skips and missing footage. Nonetheless, the videos attracted widespread media coverage; after the release of the first video, conservative lawmakers in Congress singled out Planned Parenthood and began to push bills that would strip the organization of federal family planning funding. No such attempts by Congress to cut federal family planning money from Planned Parenthood have become law. Conservative politicians in several states have also used this as an opportunity to cut or attempt to cut family planning funding at the state level.
Number 12: When Greed and Corruption Become the Norm is an investigative documentary by Ghanaian award-winning journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas and his investigative group, Tiger Eye P. I.
#IAmAnas is a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign that started in 2015. Users tweeted to express support for the undercover investigative works of Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas.
This is a list of investigative works by Ghanaian undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, sorted from most recent date to least recent.
BBC Africa Eye is an investigative branch of the BBC World Service. It has a network of local and investigative journalists and researchers working across Africa and produces a bi-weekly TV and online investigations series broadcast in English, Hausa, Swahili and French. The series focuses on topics that are of interest and concern to young and underserved audience and aims to strengthen and encourage investigative journalism across Africa.