24 minute read
On the Edge
The ethics of going undercover
by Joshua Hunt Illustrations by Tim McDonagh A few years ago, on a July afternoon in Shanghai, I descended an escalator at the Science and Technology Museum, headed to a vast underdetective agency, which helped pioneer the field of “brand protection.” Azim Uribe, a thirty-year-old American Pinkerton agent, was working on behalf of some corporate ground market, and switched on my iPhone’s video clients to trace and disrupt the illicit supply chains recorder. I placed the phone in the breast pocket of fueling Shanghai’s black market. Uribe had told me my shirt, lens facing out, so that the camera captured that he was relying on a network of informants, often the world as it appeared before me: one long, brightly criminals themselves, who sold him information on lit hallway after another, lined with shops selling rival operations. I was relying on Uribe. He and his everything from NBA jerseys to iPads—dozens of boss, Angelo Krizmanic, an Australian, had invited storefronts stocked with thousands of products, all me to tag along with them for the day. “We’re going of them counterfeit. Knockoffs have been estimated to meet a guy named Kevin,” Krizmanic said as we to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry entered the mall. “He thinks Azim and I are just a in China and Hong Kong. I was shadowing a pair couple of expat businessmen, so be careful not to call of agents from Pinkerton, America’s oldest private us by our real names.”
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Like the counterfeit items themselves, the shops that sell them tend to look a bit off: an overabundance of stock, signage with silly fonts and strange punctuation. Kevin’s store looked like the real thing, though, with handsome wood-paneled walls and tasteful lighting. When the Pinkerton guys and I arrived, he greeted us with a smile. The “Gucci” and “Louis Vuitton” handbags he was hawking looked pretty nice to me. “Shit,” Krizmanic said. He told Kevin to stop messing around and show us the good stuff. This, I learned, was standard practice when shopping at fake markets, which keep their lowestquality merchandise out front to foist on tourists. It was also a ploy to find Kevin’s secret storeroom, which could lead to any number of illicit warehouses and factories after just a few days of surveillance.
Instead of taking the bait, Kevin surprised us by revealing some better merchandise closer at hand:
with the click of a button and a light push, a section of the wall gave way to reveal a hidden room filled with more knockoff bags. The four of us piled in. When the door closed behind us, Kevin activated a magnetic lock. I checked my phone, found there was no reception, and realized we couldn’t leave until Kevin let us out. Uribe poked around, trying to catch a glimpse of something; Krizmanic asked to see some bags in different colors and sizes. Kevin made vague reference to having bribed police: “I pay every month, so no trouble.” I made nervous small talk.
Feeling claustrophobic, I considered the stakes. Though the Pinkerton agents had adopted false identities, the rules of my profession demanded that I use my real name. I’d agreed to surreptitiousness—I could pass as just one of the guys—but I’d stipulated that if Kevin confronted me, I’d be honest with him about what I was doing there. If he’d paid the police well enough, the consequences of my getting found out could include deportation or other legal trouble; I might be asked for a bribe. My phone was still filming; I hoped Kevin wouldn’t notice.
It was hard to know whether Uribe and Krizmanic would stick to our agreement under unforeseen circumstances—or, for that matter, if I would. In such moments, when professional diligence must be weighed against personal safety, it’s easy to question your judgment and whether your ethical standards are truly the consensus view. I had graduated from journalism school only a couple years earlier and then taken an overseas posting at Reuters, where restraint and rigor are codified as “trust principles.” But traditional newsrooms were disappearing, and my classmates had taken divergent paths: Many had gone to upstart operations like Vice, where transgressive provocation was the norm. Others entered the world of podcasting, where even the New York Times has found it challenging to maintain consistent editorial standards. Some filtered onto the production staffs of documentaries produced for Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, which have tremendous appetites for true-crime stories and, frequently, murky reportorial ethics. A few joined the ranks of The Daily Show and its diaspora (Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Wyatt Cenac), which have made fake news a viable career option for real journalists. The latest hit of the not-quite-documentary genre, How To with John Wilson, a combination of vérité filmmaking and personal narration, conducts oddball investigations of the sort familiar to any journalism student with access to no one important and a deadline looming.
Trapped in Kevin’s closet of counterfeits, wondering if I’d wind up in a Chinese jail cell, it occurred to me that the glories of skirting ethical rules while undercover have been many—outnumbered, perhaps, only by the tragedies of punctilious journalism’s eroding impact. And I thought the same again last year, when I watched Sacha Baron Cohen’s turn in the Borat sequel, which managed the novel trick of producing news without producing journalism: Cohen engages in a kind of undercover project of his own, engineering real-world headlines by luring Rudy Giuliani into a compromising position, a hand down his trousers in a hotel room alongside a young female interviewer. The Borat footage was played, over and over, by reputable outlets.
It struck me as strange that, for all the constraints journalists put on ourselves as we go about our work, news organizations are evidently willing to amplify salacious, genre-bending stunts. Press institutions are struggling now more than ever, and it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about the rules of reporting we’ve inherited while the world around us changes. The ethical rules we’ve got, it seems, can only take a story so far.
Before I became a journalist, my sense of how reporters ought to behave was shaped largely by the work of Ted Conover, the author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. To research it, Conover spent nearly a year as a corrections officer, which provided him an unprecedented look at the toll of prison life on the incarcerated and their jailers. When applying for the job, he used his real name and employment history; throughout his time at Sing Sing, he told no lies. “It colors how you read the story if the reporter was actively deceiving a
subject,” Conover told me recently. “I think the kind of reader I want is going to ask herself, ‘Well, was it worth fooling that person or deceiving them in order to elicit the greater truth you were after?’ ”
The tension between small deceits and great truths in undercover journalism dates back to a classic of the genre: For her 1887 exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, Nellie Bly deprived herself of sleep to feign symptoms that got her committed to a women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), in New York’s East River. Once there, she experienced firsthand the abuse and neglect that patients had been forced to endure; that October, she shared what she’d learned with readers of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. It was a sensational stunt and a tremendous public service, prompting much-needed change to mental-health care and giving powerful figures a new kind of investigative
reporter to fear. It also established a standard with which undercover reporters have grappled ever since: Bly showed that, if the resulting story is big enough, and the public service substantial enough, readers will forgive dubious methods.
Many followed in her path, with greater or lesser degrees of nobility. Starting in 1965, Hunter S. Thompson immersed himself, gonzo style, in the ranks of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. While chronicling their violent exploits, he grew so close to his subjects that he wound up defending reprehensible crimes, including rape. As the decade went by, Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and others of the emergent New Journalism movement sought to resolve the ethical conundrums of reporting by making the author central: deception and self-delusion are not abstractions, after all, but universal problems, and by addressing them in full view of the reader, using first-person prose, a writer could build trust alongside moral tension.
In 1977, the Chicago Sun-Times, seeking to investigate allegations of corruption among city employees, went so far as to open a bar, the Mirage Tavern, staffed by journalists and filled with hidden cameras. The result was a twenty-five-part series on Chicago officials engaged in everything from tax fraud to shakedowns, sometimes over health and safety code violations that posed a clear danger to the public. (The “Mirage” series was nominated for a Pulitzer, though it didn’t win; Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post and a Pulitzer board member, couldn’t get past the unorthodox undercover methods.)
Over time, form surpassed function. By the nineties, programs like NBC’s Dateline blended reality television, tabloid journalism, and crime drama; under its umbrella, MSNBC’s To Catch a Predator used hidden-camera sting operations to bust alleged pedophiles. (Eventually, To Catch a Predator became the subject of its own exposé, when 20/20 investigated the death of an assistant district attorney from Texas who killed himself after the camera crew and police showed up at his house. The show eventually faded from the network’s lineup.) Starting in 1994, Vice reduced the New Journalism’s procedural transparency to a kind of pantomime. Video producers, in particular, seemed to relish stunts: they sent Dennis Rodman, the basketball star, to North Korea, where Kim Jong-un, the dictator, became his “friend for life”; staffers bought enough marijuana (for a story) to qualify Vice as a distributor. At one point, a boss at Vice asked a female journalist to go undercover as a sex worker for a segment on prostitution; she declined.
In that context, journalism became fully inverted as performance: The Daily Show premiered in 1996. “We did it all just like any newsgathering operation would,” Beth Littleford, one of the original correspondents, told me. Locations had to be scouted, local crew members hired, sources vetted. “The questions were just a little more ridiculous.” The Daily Show became a cultural phenomenon, spawning an entire universe of programs that reported information without taking themselves too seriously—and that bent rules their progenitor hadn’t.
Before long, the pileup of infotainment crashed into the arrival of the internet, and the ubiquity of phone-cameras changed the rules of engagement. Once anyone on the street could document events as they saw them, every moment, everywhere, was a potential story. Casual, surreptitious recording became commonplace among a public largely unaware of professional journalistic ethical code. Expectations of privacy shifted. “We need to rethink what we mean by ‘undercover’ in an environment in which you have people being taped at fundraisers they think are off the record by people with handheld devices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. That may be why, in Kevin’s Shanghai market, I didn’t hesitate to film without his consent.
Things got even more fluid online, where one could freely observe the virtual lives of others with a level of intimacy that surpassed even that of the
Mirage Tavern. Sometimes what people cop to on social media—in the forums of right-wing extremists, say—reveals more than a journalist might ever hope to see in person. By lurking, or creating a burner account, one can be entirely invisible—an anonymous “user,” able to conduct close surveillance under the cover of normal internet behavior, simply the way my generation has lived since adolescence. For a reporter, the truth is out there to be clicked through, with no press pass required, no sources to coax, no checkpoints for small deceits. As Jamieson told me, “I don’t think we know where the boundaries are right now, even in normalized institutional journalism.”
In 2006, Ken Silverstein, who was the Washington editor for Harper’s magazine, bought himself a tailored suit, a leather briefcase, and a cellphone with a UK number, and began introducing himself to some of the most prominent lobbyists in town. Over email, he told them that his name was Kenneth Case—a fictitious character representing an invented consulting firm, “The Maldon Group,” which, he claimed, had a financial stake in Turkmenistan and wanted to improve that position by enhancing the public image of its government. His goal, he wrote the following year, was to find out how many American lobbyists would jump at the chance to represent the interests of a regime “only slightly less Stalinist” than North Korea.
“It wasn’t a rogue operation, obviously,” Silverstein told me. He’d arranged a plan with his editors. “We discussed whether it was appropriate and concluded that it was.” Silverstein had spent years reporting on DC lobbyists, but their limited disclosure requirements prevented him from learning much more than which firms were willing to work for repressive dictators and how much they got paid for doing so. To learn what sorts of promises these lobbyists make, and how they go about keeping them, he decided that he would need to go undercover.
I first read Silverstein’s story before I became a journalist, and, as with Conover’s book, I found its revelations compelling and its methodology reasonable—especially since Silverstein clearly explained his motivation for going to such lengths to get the story. Some felt differently. (“No matter how good the story,” Howard Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post, “lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”) “It created a controversy within the journalism world,” Silverstein said. “But I think there’s a huge disconnect between the journalism world and most Americans.” For the most part, readers care more about lobbyists’ working for dictators than they do about the undercover means taken to report that fact.
Brooke Kroeger, a journalism professor at New York University and the author of Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012), has for years advocated “a restoration of honor and legitimacy to the discomfiting techniques” of the practice. She supports clandestine methods mainly because of their sheer effectiveness. Around the time that Silverstein was on the trail of lobbyists, she told me, the Washington Post published an undercover series exposing the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: Dana Priest and Anne Hull spent more than four months reporting there, absent official permission; they’d shown up at the front gate without identifying themselves as journalists and asked sources not to reveal what they were up to. “I mean, short of putting on white coats, they did everything to obscure who they were and what they were doing,” Kroeger said. “And I thought it was fine.”
The Post got results: “Within a day after the series began, work crews were on-site upgrading the mold- and rodent-infested outpatient facilities,” Kroeger wrote in an essay, “Why Surreptitiousness Works.” “Within weeks, the hospital’s commander, the secretary of the Army, and the Army’s surgeon general had lost their jobs. Congress scheduled special field subcommittee hearings on-site at the hospital, inviting testimony from some of the reporters’ named sources. Three blue-ribbon panels began investigating how wounded U.S. soldiers who had served their country so valiantly could be treated so badly under the Army’s own watch. Praise was universal.” That included a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Kroeger doesn’t think undercover work should be no-holds-barred: “The rule of thumb is that when confronted, you give up and tell,” she said. But it would be a shame, she argued, if journalists limited themselves to covering only the stories to which they are granted formal access. And to the extent that the rules of conduct were designed to function within a framework of “press relations”—a world of people and institutions dominated by white, heterosexual men—the resulting journalism elevates and reproduces that perspective as the default. Of course, those best able to recede into the background of American institutions tend to be the likes of Conover, Silverstein, Priest, and Hull—all of whom are white. Journalists from marginalized backgrounds, by contrast, are well acquainted with the risk of being confronted.
Following the conventional rules, there’s a lot the press is likely to miss. (I’m Native American, and even I tend to assume a white perspective when reading American newspapers and magazines.) Stepping outside the default view can mean getting labeled an “activist,” but being ethically minded won’t save a reporter from that perception. It commonly falls to small, upstart journalism organizations to challenge accepted modes of practice and framing. “For us, the idea that someone’s identity would put them too close to a story to report on it just
seems foundationally absurd,” Ashton Lattimore, the editor in chief of Prism, a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet, told me. “I think quite the contrary— you know, bringing your own identity into your understanding of what you’re reporting on can only, in many cases, deepen your ability to report with empathy and with accuracy.”
Often, that’s the only way to get the real story, as was the case when the writer Suki Kim went undercover as an instructor at an elite school in North Korea. She did so at great personal risk: historically, Americans born in South Korea, like Kim, face harsh penalties when caught engaging in subversive activities. It took her three years just to get the
position, at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, where she spent six months meticulously documenting the experience for a book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (2014). She wound up with a knowledge of North Korea that may be totally singular—unlike the work of journalists from outlets like CNN and the Associated Press, who see only stage-managed glimpses of life approved by the regime, hers was a vivid, unvarnished firsthand account.
“It’s hard to explain, but just because you go undercover doesn’t mean you’re lying,” Kim told me. “I mean, you have to wear a guise of something else in order to get an invitation to a closed world that is closed for a reason, often because it’s corrupt and unjust.” Once you’ve put on that guise, she added, it’s important to wear it with care—to do your job well as you play your role. That is, after all, prudent source management. “For you to actually experience that life and bring that life into words, you need to put your heart in it,” she said. “That’s also how you protect yourself and protect them.”
In some cases, the best storytelling comes from resisting categorization, letting sources guide you, and seeing what you can get away with. John Wilson is not a journalist, exactly, though How To may be considered reportage on the mundane and occasionally absurd, as he wrests poetry from quotidian footage and visual gags (an empty pair of shoes waiting for a subway; a man dragging an air conditioner down the sidewalk by its cord). Last December, he appeared as a guest on a YouTube variety show, Office Hours Live, hosted by the surrealist comedian Tim Heidecker. Wilson, who is thirty-four, streamed via Zoom from his home, in Queens. He wore a white T-shirt, round eyeglasses, and a short-cropped beard. His head was shaved and bare; while out in the field, he sometimes covers it with a cap that reads PRESS.
For a while, the interview stuck to the expected fare: two entertainers admiring each other’s work, talking about mutual show-business friends, discussing How To’s origins and popularity (Vanity Fair named it the best thing on TV in 2020). Then a producer sitting behind Heidecker jumped in with a question: “How are you allowed to show all these people?”
Anyone who has seen How To knows that “these people” could refer to one of two categories: First, the random individuals filmed shirtless, sour-faced, or otherwise not at their best on the streets of New York, where the production is based. “If you’re not really saying anything bad about them or suggesting they’re doing something they’re not,” Wilson said, “then you can usually get away with putting their image onscreen.” Second, there are the characters who factor into an episode’s conceit, often tragicomic figures who, it would seem, want to speak before the camera even if they might be better off avoiding it.
The latter group can’t be explained solely by the fact that New York is a state of single-party consent when it comes to audio and video recording. In the pilot episode, Wilson travels to Cancún for spring break; he meets a young man named Chris, who, across multiple interviews, appears drunk and rarely says a word I could imagine wanting to have preserved on film. Chris not only signed the necessary release forms to appear on How To but volunteered himself in the first place: Wilson had been filming somebody else when Chris approached and asked to rap for the camera.
Like any smart journalist, Wilson had set himself up in the right place at the right time to meet the right subject, and kept the tape running. He’d honed that instinct after college, while working for a private investigator. “I had to watch hours and hours of PI video and try to find a single incriminating moment in a sea of nothing,” he told me. “It made me more perceptive, and I started to notice bizarre little details everywhere.” That job also influenced Wilson’s shooting style; he realized that “filming people from a certain distance felt so much more natural.” The space between him and the speaker, ultimately, serves the same purpose as an undercover reporter’s false identity or hidden camera: leaving room for those truths that might otherwise remain unrevealed. (“I want to do the antithesis of what you usually see on any kind of broadcast reality show or documentary interview,” he told The Believer recently. “I keep the handles on it to let people speak in their own words, even if it is awkward, because you don’t get a good sense of who people are anymore in the media we consume.”)
Wilson and his producers maintain a set of ethical standards, though a lot of judgment calls are involved: “It’s kind of a complex calculation with every single shot,” he explained to me. “You just have to put the visuals and the voice-over together and just make sure that the joke isn’t cruel.” Occasionally he’s talked out of using certain material, if the participants aren’t enthusiastic. “These subjects of ours believe very strongly in the strength of their message,” Clark Filio, an associate producer for How To, said.
That philosophy can lead How To in unexpected directions. On a whim, Wilson hung around the parking lot at MetLife Stadium ahead of WrestleMania 35. He brought with him an icebreaker written ahead of time: Do you think Mankind is going to make a comeback? (Mankind is the name of a retired pro wrestler.) Eventually, after he’d posed the question to dozens of strangers, he handed his microphone
to a man holding a can of beer, who proceeded to talk about how he spent his free time catching child predators. “Our show is cool because we can kind of stop everything that we’re doing and just be like, ‘Well, let’s go hang out with this guy,’ ” Filio said.
In the finished episode, Wilson arrives at the man’s home, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. “Well, we’re going to go catch us a predator today,” the man tells him, apparently inspired by To Catch a Predator and delighted by the prospect of a camera capturing the capture. “We were prepared to do it,” Filio said. “It didn’t end up happening.” When Wilson was around, the amateur pedophile hunter had no luck. But had the opportunity presented itself, Wilson would have gone along with the sting operation, undeterred by its evident ethical quandaries—and unsure whether the result might be grossly exploitative, irresponsible and dangerous, or, improbably, lyrical and revealing. “It’s a good example of the differences between our show and, like, actual sort of capital-J journalism,” Filio said. “We’re attracted to kind of, you know, morbid, like, potentially problematic sort of areas.”
The reign of Donald Trump presented a new moral paradox for journalists to puzzle over: while reckoning with the ways in which our profession was ill-prepared for a president who lied so openly and so often, we entertained obvious fictions about those enabling and supporting him. In Washington, the press allowed anonymous White House sources to tell readers, over and over, how they were more decent than their actions might suggest; in rural diners across the United States, reporters dispatched from the coasts gathered stories from white men who insisted that their support of Trump had nothing to do with racism. After four years of Rust Belt theater, the genre revealed little more of American life than how hard it is to get the whole truth over a cup of coffee—and, ironically, how badly people crave a type of “positive proof” that is often inaccessible.
In January, a few days after Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the Capitol, I spoke with Conover about how journalists might better confront the breakdown of political and journalistic norms we’ve seen in recent years. “There’s a whole universe of possibilities that traditional journalists are locked out of because they have to declare their status,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if some up-and-coming journalist, whether with or without an assignment, decided to go to the Trump rally?” They did, in fact: reporters like Luke Mogelson, of The New Yorker, were on the scene, documenting the carnage from the inside. At the same time, there was ample footage shot by the seditionists themselves, as well as by rioters who later claimed to be documentarians, seeking absolution for criminal behavior. In this context, what distinguishes a journalist is intention as much as methodology.
Before it exploded into public view, of course, the truth about Trump’s extremist supporters was hidden in plain sight; traditional reporting, which had granted unearned dignity to violent people, mainly served to obscure, rather than reveal, the brutishness and coded racism apparent among the right wing online and at rallies. Producing effective journalism, Conover suggested, might depend on expanding our sense of where journalists can go, and how; when stepping over a line, reporters may well find prescribed rules less useful than their own judgment.
There is reason to believe that breaking from the existing ethical code will do less harm than good. Our assumptions about what readers expect from us, after all, may not be quite right: according to Gallup, over the past two decades, trust in American mass media has declined from 55 to 40 percent; a third of those polled don’t trust the media whatsoever. Readers either don’t share our standards or don’t care—and perhaps some might find they’re better served by a deeper commitment to the truth and a willingness to deviate from convention if the whole story depends on it.
Back in Shanghai, Kevin tried to sell me a watch. It was a knockoff, of course, but a nice one, he said— good enough that a few NBA stars had bought them from him in bulk to give away as gifts. Before I could
express my skepticism, he smiled and waved me over to his side, where he scrolled through photos on his phone to show me pictures of athletes. At that point, I decided not to dig in further about his business. We chatted about American celebrities.
In the end, I left without a watch and told Kevin no lies—they’d done me no good in my personal life, and I expected they’d do no good for me professionally. But I did include Kevin in my story, and I’m sure he would feel no less deceived reading it than if I had used some false identity. Somehow, the slipperiness of that distinction doesn’t bother me much; without some level of dishonesty, I could never have seen Kevin clearly enough to portray him truthfully. Where I draw that line now remains determined by my past—shaped by the mentors, educators, and colleagues who taught me how to do what I do. Five or ten years from now, however, it’s easy to imagine a world in need of something different.
Plus, there’s this: months after meeting Kevin, when I reached out to the athletes I’d seen on his phone to verify what he’d told me, each denied it. That was not especially surprising: one had just signed a sponsorship deal with the watch company TAG Heuer; the others, if they admitted to such a thing, would forever draw sideways glances when giving a gift. And the fact was that Kevin had an incentive to lie—businessmen, like professional athletes, ditchdiggers, and members of just about every profession, have no code of ethics that might encourage others to give them the benefit of the doubt. cjr
