On reporters and deception: Some thoughts
Re the dustup about Celeste Biever pretending to be Maria from Cornell while investigating IDEA clubs:
Now, I hope I am not opening a big can of worms here but I naturally approach it from the perspective of a journalist of nearly 35 years pounding beats….
I don’t think it wrong in principle for a reporter to go undercover.
A lot depends on two things: whether the public interest is at stake and whether key information could be obtained otherwise.
(I am assuming, of course, that no laws are broken, no one is thoughtlessly harmed, and no private business that should remain private is heedlessly exposed.)
At the Discovery Institute’s blog, John West quotes from the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists:
Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public.
which helpfully highlights the issue. Incidentally, the original adds “Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story” – another important consideration. Readers have a right to know how the information was obtained.
Undercover media investigations have often served the public interest by exposing rackets, corruptions, shoddy practices, and deceptions, in situations where it was really true that the information could not be obtained in any other way.
So here is where the issue gets tricky, in my view: Celeste Biever’s editors may very well honestly believe that Read More ›