NRJ Book Review: Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception

Abstract

Brooke Kroeger, Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception, (Medill School of Journalism, 2012). Paperback, 496 pages, $24.95. Foreward by Pete Hamill.Review by Peter W. GoodmanEvery journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.-Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990.Brooke Kroeger does not mention Janet Malcolm's notorious screed about Joe McGinniss in Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception, her encyclopedically rich journey through the annals of reporting in the American press. But Kroeger, a professor of journalism at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, is taking dead aim at that narrow, mean-spirited attitude about journalism, an attitude that has been reflected in recent decades among journalists themselves. The book argues:For a restoration of honor and legitimacy to the discomfiting techniques of reporting because of their value to so much of the journalism that has mattered in the past century and a half. . . . (8)The term encyclopedic is an appropriate description of Undercover Reporting, part of the Medill School of Journalism's Visions of the American Press. The book examines hundreds of examples of journalism in which reporters did not identify themselves, adopted false identities, took jobs under false pretenses, dissembled or otherwise obfuscated the true purpose of their presence. Merely listing her definitions of undercover is reminiscent of a biblical genealogy:They have posed as; lived as or among; worked as; interned as; volunteered as....for almost a full page of text. (11)This thoroughness is justified by the depth of resistance to the concept of journalists' using deception in any way as they gather information. She saves what may be the most egregious example of this resistance for the penulti mate chapter about the Chicago Sun-Times' celebrated or excoriated Mirage series, in which the newspaper ran a bar for six months in the fall and winter of 1977. The paper's detailed documentation of widespread corruption and bribery among city officials resulted in federal, state and city investigations, reorganization of Chicago government, suspension of city inspectors and widespread public approbation.What it did not get was a Pulitzer Prize.Kroeger, who examines a number of Pulitzer controversies, cites a nearforensic account by Myra McPherson of The Washington Post of the Pulitzer board's decision, in which a number of eminent journalists-many of whom themselves had used or supervised investigations-considered that there was a mood of new moral stringency. (268) A shiftin the zeitgeist had made the use of ethically ambiguous reporting methods a far less appealing prospect, Kroeger writes. (269) In the peremptory words of The Washington Post's Ben Bradlee, We instruct our reporters not to misrepresent themselves, period. (269)But before arriving at the Mirage, Kroeger builds a very imposing foundation from which to push back. Starting with pseudonymous reporting about slavery before the Civil War, she presents chapters on every imaginable type of investigation: virtual slavery among Pacific Island cotton workers; the sex trade; urban poverty; factory work; race; prisons, mental hospitals and similar institutions; and ideological groups such as the KKK and certain religious organizations. …