This article originally appeared in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
In 2007, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein went undercover to test Washington lobbyists’ taste for sleaze. Using an alias, Silverstein created a fictitious energy firm that ostensibly did business in Turkmenistan and approached professional lobbyists to see if they could help cleanse the regime’s neo-Stalinist reputation. The bill for services rendered—newspaper op-eds bylined by established think-tankers and academics, visits to Turkmenistan by congressional delegations, and other exercises in public relations—would have been about $1.5 million. (Disclosure: I consider Silverstein a friend.)
But when Silverstein’s piece, “Their Men in Washington: Undercover With DC’s Lobbyists for Hire,” was published in the July issue of Harper’s, the resulting uproar had less to do with craven lobbyists than with journalistic impropriety. Various critics assailed Silverstein for his charade: Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a CBS News blogger, an American Journalism Review writer, and other notables. Journalists shall not lie, the critics mainly agreed. Doing so diminishes their credibility and that of the entire profession.
But Silverstein’s subterfuge was no outlier, as Brooke Kroeger demonstrates in her comprehensive history and exercise in soul-searching, Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception. For more than 150 years, American journalists have been playing make-believe to get themselves thrown into jails and loony bins; conniving their way into punishing factory jobs; and posing as high school students, Ku Klux Klan members, and even pregnant women in search of abortionists.
Journalists have even fashioned Mission: Impossible scenarios to snare wrongdoers, as the Chicago Sun-Times did in 1978, when it acquired a downtown bar, named it The Mirage, and staffed it with reporters. The paper documented, in a 25-part series, payoffs to city health inspectors, shakedowns by state liquor inspectors, tax fraud, kickbacks, and other crimes. The series was regarded as both a sensation and an abomination—although a Pulitzer Prize jury tapped it for an award in the Local Investigative Specialized Reporting category, the Pulitzer board overturned the jury’s selection because it disapproved of the Sun-Times’s methods.
