Undercover Reporting Research Articles

Crime and Reform: An Underworld of Journalism

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the shrouded career of undercover reporter Natalie de Bogory (mostly from 1911–1922) to illustrate how reporters collaborated with public-private networks to regulate real or perceived crime and extend the reach of the security state, before the practice later expanded within the FBI. De Bogory was twice a guide. Undercover for newspapers, she escorted readers through an urban working-class underworld of dance, sex, and employed single women. Her journalism, however, obscured her more covert work. For private reformers who partnered with city officials, she investigated social issues, including allegations of “White slavery,” the alleged sex trafficking of immigrant women. That work, during the nativist hysteria of World War I, drew de Bogory into a scheme to promote the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was later dubbed a “Warrant for Genocide.” This history of de Bogory is an argument for studying the careers of relatively unknown journalists who often worked multiple jobs to understand their impact, and expose the interconnectivity of journalism with other professions and institutions. This article reconstructs de Bogory’s career to reclaim the tradition of reporters collaborating with reformist public-private networks. Then, that neglected history is framed as a model for Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which publicized the Protocols.

Mortimer Thomson’s “Witches of New York”: Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade

During the 1850s, undercover journalists broke new ground by covering slave auctions, Northern uprisings, and fraud. In 1857, Mortimer Thomson, a comedic writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went undercover. For the series, “The Witches of New York,” he visited New York fortune tellers who advertised regularly in the newspapers. They sold tonics, offered to find stolen property, helped with matchmaking, and claimed they could tell the future. The series also took the reader to the seedier parts of Lower Manhattan to debunk tricksters and frauds. Later, his works were chronicled in a book, The Witches of New York. His work predates the turn of the twentieth century “stunt journalists” such as Nellie Bly, who wrote first-person narratives about their adventures to actively expose social injustice.

Narratologies of Autodiegetic Undercover Reportage: Albert Deane Richardson’s The Secret Service

Narratologies of Autodiegetic Undercover Reportage: Albert Deane Richardson’s The Secret Service Katrina Quinn (bio) Working on behalf of Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, correspondent Albert Deane Richardson (1833–69) reported from the Confederacy in the weeks immediately preceding the American Civil War. Before making a last-minute escape to the North, Richardson traveled to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, providing Tribune readers a firsthand account of Southern life and psyche at a time when political tensions were running high. Richardson’s memoir of the journey was later published as the first part of the widely read volume, The Secret Service, The Field, The Dungeon, and The Escape (1865), which sold more than 90,000 copies, making it one of the most popular wartime memoirs. But Richardson was no common traveler, nor was his text simple reportage,1 for Richardson had been an undercover correspondent for one of the most despised Northern newspapers of the time, making his endeavor quite risky. From a narratological point of view, the text provides a useful example of the narrative strategies and structures that not only deliver, but also enable the reportage. On one level is the reported narrative which is the published text itself, a memoir of Richardson’s travels as an undercover reporter in the antebellum South. In many ways, this narrative presents structures we might expect of works of nonfictional participant reportage generally. It is largely chronological, as is common for a travel narrative, and it is autodiegetic—that is, written in a first-person voice with the author [End Page 1] positioned as the main character and focalizer. But as an undercover reporter entering hostile territory during the tense spring of 1861, Richardson had to, as would other undercover reporters who wish to observe without being observed, obfuscate his identity with another fictive narrative: an oral narrative operational in the experiential world of his trip. Using The Secret Service as a subject text, this study suggests a theoretical framework for the narratologies of undercover reportage. It charts the unique relationships of narrative journalism to multiple reader contingents and the use of an oral narrative to secure reporting space for undercover reporters. The study further proposes a binate narrative structure that signifies, first, the nonfictional narrative presented in the written memoir, and second, the fictional oral narrative the reporter maintains in the experiential world of his trip. Richardson and His Vagabond Ways A growing body of scholarship in recent years has examined Civil War journalism from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but little has been written about Richardson’s work, despite his strong reputation during the 1860s as a Western correspondent, Civil War special reporter, and prison camp escapee.2 Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, on October 6, 1833, Richardson went west as a young man, securing his first job with the Pittsburg Journal in 1851 and continuing on to Cincinnati in 1852, where he wrote for the Daily Unionist and various other newspapers for five years. His work with the Boston Journal took him west in 1857 to report on conflict in Kansas following the improvident Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. After meeting Horace Greeley on a stage coach to Colorado in 1859, he was retained as a special correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, reporting from the West and later from the South, both before and during the Civil War. Captured by the Confederates at Vicksburg in May 1863, Richardson was a prisoner of war until December 1864, when he and a fellow journalist made a daring wintertime escape on foot from the Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, to Union lines in Knoxville, Tennessee, a distance of nearly three hundred miles. During his imprisonment, his wife and infant daughter died, but the experience made him a wartime hero and one of the best-known war correspondents of his day. Following his escape from Salisbury, and despite lingering health issues, Richardson [End Page 2] couldn’t renounce his itinerate habits, traveling to the Pacific in 1865 with Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax. At home in New York City in 1867 and again in 1869, Richardson was shot by Daniel McFarland, the...

RPS calls for investigation after online pharmacies prescribed opioids to undercover reporter

RPS calls for investigation after online pharmacies prescribed opioids to undercover reporter

Nell Nelson's Undercover Reporting

On assignment for the Chicago Times in the late 1880s, Nell Nelson was commissioned by the newspaper to pose as a shop girl in Chicago factories. She was among many stunt girl reporters who were hired to do dangerous or unusual tasks then write about them. Stunt girls exposed corruption, at the same time providing entertainment for their readers. Nelson's firsthand accounts in “City Slave Girls of Chicago” detailed labor conditions of poor, working-class women. The Chicago series of twenty-one articles were collected into a book and resumed in the New York World. Nelson's sympathetic narratives attracted readers and inspired public debate for labor reform, which provided more evidence that women could write compelling investigative news stories.

BBC sting continues to see fall-out with striking-off of pharmacist

A London pharmacist’s claim that he was making emergency supplies when he sold prescription-only medicines (POMs) to an undercover reporter was not plausible, a fitness-to-practise (FTP) committee ruled as it struck him off.

Book Review: Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception

Brooke Kroeger Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. 496 pp.Ethical journalism and the ethics of journalists have both become a central focus of discussion, whether it is in the newsroom or in the classroom. In the 24/7 news cycle reality, where the need to keep audiences attached to a particular news outlet is becoming the sole mantra and business model, it is often the scandal, the catastrophe, or the crisis that will bring the viewer, reader, or listener back. Sometimes, we need to take a moment to step back and critique what is happening in such a space, the results of those happenings, and the implications they give light to. Undercover Reporting provides such a moment.Originally, when I started reading through the text, it seemed to be a glorification of the art. Kroeger opens with, book unabashedly celebrates the great American tradition of undercover reporting and offers an argument . . . for the restoration of its once-honored place in the array of effective journalistic techniques (p. xv). At this point, I had to ask myself, Is Kroeger being a bit idealistic here? This question remained until I read the final chapter and realized that perhaps not; she is setting us up, forcing the reader to consider the ethical realities of journalism, particularly in the twenty-first century.This is why reading the introduction and final chapter to any book is so important. The preface presents a refreshing honesty. I would have liked it to also be more overt in reminding us that, even though we can glorify certain historical moments in the profession, heralding the power of the press to right wrongs and sway public opinion, we should approach each chapter in the book as a cautionary tale so the next generation of Blys and Sinclairs can do it better.Within the preface, the idea of deception comes up repeatedly. Kroeger states, Deception not only happens in the course of reporting undercover, it is intrinsic to the form. For would-be truth tellers, this is a shaky ground (p. xv).With this in mind, Kroeger walks us through her overall argument-that undercover journalism does serve a function and needs to be practiced (perhaps now more than ever)-and offers several case studies (in historical order) to support her claim. As the reader moves from case study to case study, each presenting a strong and precise examination of undercover work that exposed the realities of slavery, postslavery, turn-of-the-century working conditions, political exploits, and military actions, the discussions present two arguments intertwined (discussions that, pedagogically, are essential if one were to use this in the classroom):1. …

NRJ Book Review: Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception

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. …

Self-regulation will put vulnerable clients at risk

Yet again, it has taken an undercover television reporter to expose inhuman treatment of vulnerable patients in a so-called care setting because the Care Quality Commission (CQC) failed to act when a senior nurse blew the whistle (news June 8).

Mr Slop

The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons has a special undercover reporter, Mr Slop FRCS (Eng). In this issue he has been looking into the new working patterns of consultants in the National Health Service. While the Editor of the Bulletin was interested in his findings, he would like to state at this point that he distances himself (a long way) from any views expressed by Mr Slop in this article.

The Merrie England Triptych: Robert Blatchford, Edward Fay and the Didactic Use of Clarion fiction

The Merrie England Triptych:Robert Blatchford, Edward Fay and the Didactic Use of Clarion fiction Deborah Mutch (bio) The proliferation of newspapers published by the new and often short-lived British socialist groups of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siécle was used as a powerful propaganda tool for disseminating socialist polemic. Many socialist periodicals of the era recognised the popularity of the New Journalism with working-class readers and, as Deian Hopkin notes, were 'deeply influenced by the general developments that occurred in the press in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century' (226). Socialist editors and proprietors embraced the layout and editorial style of the New Journalism, and they also grasped the power of what William T. Stead called 'government by journalism' (qtd. in Malone: 281). Thus, Henry Hyde Champion waged a successful investigative campaign through the Labour Elector between 1888 and 1889 against poor working conditions and long hours at the Brunner Mond chemical works in Cheshire, sending Tom Mann as an undercover reporter to pose as an employee. Keir Hardie's Labour Leader ran the 'White Slaves' series in 1899 exposing bad working conditions and long hours for Post Office employees, government and shop workers. Robert Blatchford's Clarion supported campaigns by the non-socialist Star and Daily Chronicle to protect the health and safety of female match and pottery workers. But Blatchford's most influential piece of propagandist journalism was Merrie England, an explanation of socialism described as '[h]orse-sense in tinker's English' (L. Thompson 97) which was addressed to the fictional everyman, 'John Smith, of Oldham, a hard-headed workman, fond of facts' (Clarion 4 March 1893, 8). Merrie England has been declared the most influential text in nineteenth-century British socialism. It was written, as Blatchford claimed 'to teach Socialism, to get recruits for the Socialist Army' (L. Thompson 101). Originally published in the Clarion, between 4th March and 23rd September 1893, the shilling pamphlet sold some 20,000 copies, (Blatchford, My [End Page 83] Eighty Years 196), and the penny pamphlet sold three-quarters of a million copies in the first year (Vincent 257). The penny edition was also pirated in America and translated into Welsh, Russian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Hebrew (A. Thompson 101). The effect was phenomenal, and Laurence Thompson claimed that the 'Merrie England boom added 7,000 to the Clarion's circulation' (114). The responses it generated ranged across oppositional pamphlets, sermons preached both for and against it, reviews in national newspapers, and a debate in the Oxford Union (L. Thompson 100–101). Alex Thompson repeated in his autobiography the Manchester Guardian's statement that 'for every convert made by Das Kapital there were a hundred made by Merrie England' (101). As a sustained piece of socialist literature, Merrie England has been perceived to reach further into the working-class political consciousness than any previous text. However, I would argue that the pamphlet editions lost some of the intricacy of the serialised articles. This was due to the concurrent serialisations of fiction which, when read in conjunction with the political polemic, gave Merrie England a depth and breadth that was lost once the text was removed from its original context. The serialisation of fiction in socialist periodicals had a dual function: to retain readers and to illustrate political theory. A reader's letter published in Justice in 1885 claimed the inclusion of a serialised novel would 'fix the attention of readers and also teach them some simple lessons' (10 January 6). Literature had long been used as a method of political propaganda: in Notes to the People, the Chartist Ernest Jones had proclaimed, 'Let the same moral be conveyed in a tale, and preached in a sermon, the former will make ten proselytes, when the latter will secure but one' (833). The appreciation of fiction as a didactic vehicle appears to have been understood by Blatchford, and David Vincent argues that Blatchford understood 'the synthesis between the popular and the political' (257). As editor, Blatchford overlapped the Merrie England articles with his own fiction: 'No. 66', published in the Clarion between 7th January and 1st April 1893, and...

Oxford offers places for cash

Oxford University is once again at the centre of controversy after a report in the Sunday Times which claimed that one of its colleges was prepared to offer a place to a student in return for a cash donation.1 An undercover reporter, posing as a wealthy banker, was allegedly told by senior staff at Pembroke College that they could create an extra place for his son in return for a donation …

The good, the bad, and the victims

Watch out, Britain - foreign fringe therapists are coming. In an operation more sinister than the invasion of the body snatchers, they plan to take over children's minds, turn them against their parents, and so break up families. Using hypnosis, suggestion, and sometimes even truth drugs they will plant false memories of child sex abuse which will be believed by the hapless victims. But a television documentary team has uncovered the plot. The team has talked to parents whose children have fallen prey and a victim who escaped from the therapists' clutches. An undercover reporter has managed to get footage of one of the villains in action, and the team has found a psychologist who …