Undercover Reporting

The original Pulitzer-Prize-winning series by Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest about the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A full two years before The Washington Post reported on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Salon.com reporter Walter Benjamin published a series of articles on the hospital. While Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest won Pulitzers, Benjamin's work drew relatively little attention at the time.

The popular humorist often used the undercover ruse in his work for The New York Tribune. In this instance, he posed as a client to visit a number of New York's purveyors of the "black arts" to expose their scams. The series preceded his pose as a slave buyer to cover the Butler auction in Savannah.

Olcott volunteered to cover the hanging of John Brown for the New York Tribune when the newspaper's regular correspondent had to flee under threat of Southern ire at his dispatches. He posed as a member of the Petersburg Grays, one of the regiments sent to Charles Town to guard Brown's body.

Redpath inaugurated a "Facts of Slavery" column for the New York Tribune, curating slave sale information from the Southern press, and later went South to interview slaves so they could have a forum for relating their experiences in their own words. He later took jobs at Southern newspapers and surreptitiously sent reports back north in the guise of letters to relatives in Minnesota. They, in turn, under prior arrangement, forwarded the reports to editors.

The popular humorist and New York Tribune columnist used the undercover ruse often in his newspaper work. In this instance, he visited a number of New York purveyors of "the black arts" and exposed their cons.

Journalists from the United States and Australia get inside the post-Civil War practice of recruiting Pacific Islanders to work the world's non-U.S. plantations on extended contracts of indenture.

George Morrison was a twenty-year-old Australian medical student looking for an adventurous diversion after failing his intermediate exam. He self-styled an assignment to see how the labor trade of Queensland worked in 1882, signing on to sail as an ordinary seaman aboard the Lavinia.Three months later, the ship returned from its "blackbirding" expedition with a new batch of recruits from the New Hebrides and Banks. Morrison wrote an eight-part travelogue for The Leader, and later, provided a more critical view for The Age. 

J.D. Melvin, at the behest of his editors at the Argus, gets a job as a supercargo aboard the Helena on a round-trip journey from Queensland to the Solomon Islands.  He observes and participates in the return of 60 workers at the completion of their work contracts, and the recruitment and transport of 90 new workers from the islands. 

Reporters have worked as guards or gotten themselves arrested -- sometimes with the aid of authorities and sometimes without -- to investigate conditions inside prisons and jails.

Boston Globe reporter Richard H. Stewart spent six days in a Salem jail on a staged drunk driving conviction and wrote about his stay in a five-part-series called "Doing Time." In it, he describes everything from the conditions pf the facilities, the feeling of being confined to a cell for 13 hours a day and even the revealing and often emotional group alcohol counselling sessions he was required to attend as part of his sentence. The series ran almost as a cautionary tale during the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  

San Francisco Chronicle prisons investigation involving undercover as a prisoner by Tim Findley and as a guard by Charles Howe.

Arizona Daily Star reporter R.H. Ring spent 10 days posing as a maximum-security convict at Arizona's Florence State Penitentiary. Very few people in the prison system knew of his stay, not even Florence's warden.

One of a number of high-impact undercover investigations undertaken by the New York World Telegram & Sun in the 1960s, including Woody Klein's worst tenement series, Dale Wright's migrant workers series, and George N. Allen's Undercover Teacher. Mok's series won the prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award and the Heywood Broun Memorial Award.

Journalists have devised any number of ruses to get inside hospitals and clinics --  as patients or staff members.

Frank Smith's series, under the editorship of Louis Ruppel at the Chicago Daily Times, got national attention and was, according to Time, a real circulation-builder for the newspaper.

Thompson's assignment was to create a new identity for himself, join "the new Klan," and spend a few months observing it from the inside. (In the newsroom, the cover story was that Thompson had gone into rehab.) That time undercover stretched into a year and a half. His work complemented a major series on the new Klan. As his editor, John Seigenthaler, wrote in the preface to the book that followed: "To get behind their pious platitudes and expose what they really stood for, it was necessary for Thompson to misrepresent who he was. Had there been any other way to expose the Klan, Thompson's underground role would not have been necessary."

Sinclair's novel on immigrant life in the US is most famous for its description of the meatpacking industry. The author interviewed workers extensively and blended in at the plants to do his research over the course of more than a month.

Jack London's first-hand account of life in London's East End, sleeping on the street or in work houses some of the time.

A Pulitzer Prize winning series on medicaid fraud in New York.

Pierre Salinger goes undercover in two California jails (with pre-arranged faux arrests) to investigate conditions throughout the state penal system, as part of a major series for the San Francisco Chronicle. Salinger also did a follow-up series. 

The series examines welfare inefficiencies - and the ease with which some who are not needy can take advantage of the aid - based on six months of reporting, including Ed May's three-month undercover stint as a welfare case worker in Erie County, New York. 

In this 16-part series, New York World-Telegram and Sun reporter George Allen reports on the two months he spent working as an English teacher at Brooklyn's John Marshall Junior High School in an effort to "report on a crime-ridden school from the inside." He was credentialed a few months earlier as part of the assignment and took three education courses to prepare at Columbia Teachers' College, where he earned a substitute teacher's license with a falsified employment history.

A five-month investigation, led by Pamela Zekman, into the Michigan Avenue "abortion profiteers," and their dangerous and unsavory, unsanitary practices, including performing the procedure regularly on women who were not pregnant.

As a companion series to the paper's undercover teacher series, Leslie Linthicum, a twenty-four year-old reporter, posed as a high school student to examine the role of cliques, drugs, bureaucracy and other hidden everyday realities of a local high school."classmates."  

Reporter Woody Klein spends a month living in a New York City slum for a New York World Telegram & Sun series in 1959.

The result of three months of reporting and a week undercover in a Pennsylvania prison, this series examines the conditions, challenges, and systematic culture of the US prison system. Stories focus on California, Washington DC, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Reporter Dale Wright spent six months working on and off as a migrant worker along the Atlantic Seaboard for this series, which examines the conditions, exploitation, and legislation (and its effectiveness) of migrant laborer life.  ("The Forgotten People..A Report on Migrant Labor" by Dale Wright. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Dale Wright, c/o K.E. Wright-King ©1961, New York World-Telegram and Sun.)

After hearing from a source that janitors, without washing, were sometimes used to move patients from surgery rooms to their beds, a  reporter poses as a janitor at Von Solbrig Hospital. The series, a Task Force investigation, also examines the institution's encouragement of unnecessary procedures for welfare patients.

A six-part series with extensive follow-up reports and investigations into Chicago's private ambulance companies.  The firms named in this series all transported welfare and elderly patients, many profiting through the system. 

Althelia Knight visited Lorton Reformatory repeatedly to document the ease with which drugs were smuggled into the institution. The trip, about 1/2 hour, was usually undertaken in a van run by a private driver, usually operating without a permit. 

A Lawrence Otis Graham, an Ivy league-educated lawyer went undercover as a bus boy at a Greenwich country club, curious about why the club doesn't seem to have any African American members.

Washington Post reporter Neil Henry lived for two months as a bum in Baltimore then Washington D.C.. The series, titled "Down & Out," is written in the first person and consists of profiles of the people and places he encountered and accounts of the daily routines of the homeless.

The six-part series follows the journey of a teenage boy, Enrique, from Honduras, through Mexico, and across the border into the United States to reunite with his mother. 

Tribune Investigative Task Force member William Mullen uncovered evidence of widespread election fraud in the March 21 presidential primaries in Chicago while working undercover as a clerk in the Chicago Board of Election Commissioner's City Hall office.

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute for an undercover camera investigation. Some low-level employees of the organization provided earnest answers to the pair's questions about avoiding detection and tax evasion, among other things.  Fox News and Andrew Breitbart's Biggovernment.com (which was launched with these videos) helped to push the story beyond conservative media outlets and draw attention to the pair's findings.  As a result, and after considerable media attention, ACORN was defunded by Congress.

The work of groups such as James O'Keefe's Project Veritas and Lila Rose's LiveAction and their undercover operations.

O'Keefe secretly recorded a conversation between NPR's Ron Schiller and two of O'Keefe's partners, posing as representatives of the "Muslim Education Action Center."  The video, which was later revealed to be heavily edited, contained a number of instances of Schiller allegedly calling the Tea Party racist and Islamophobic.  

Lila Rose, with the help of James O'Keefe, has targeted Planned Parenthood for undercover video investigations multiple times, alleging that her work proves the organization's support of black genocide, tolerance of the sex slave trade, and other criminal and civil offenses. 

In 2007, Ken Silverstein posed as a representative of a firm with stakes in improving the public image of Turkmenistan, and its dictatorial regime. Under this guise, with considerable deception, he met with D.C. lobbying firms who vied for his business. The results were a story that revealed a thread of depravity in everyday D.C. business.

W.T. Stead's sensational undercover series on "white slavery," child prostitution in and exported from London, featured the work of two women posing undercover as prostitutes and the purchase, by Stead himself, of a 13-year-old girl.

Ray Sprigle, a white reporter from Pittsburgh, goes undercover as a light-skinned black man in the deep south. 

Dateline NBC ran a controversial, popular series of hidden camera stings across the country exposing (and, eventually, facilitating the arrest of) adult men who solicit sex with minors online. NBC paid an advocate group called Perverted Justice to set up "decoy" meetings with men who initiated sexual conversations with people posing as underage girls and boys. The men would show up at a house filled with NBC cameras, host Chris Hansen, and, as the series progressed, decoy actresses and police waiting outside. Hansen would confront the man with the transcripts of chat conversations leading up to the meeting. Once the police began to collaborate with the Perverted Justice stings, the men would walk outside only to be immediately arrested.

The Times published two simultaneous reports of time spent undercover with US Nazi groups in 1937, before World War II. The reporters, brothers John C. and James J. Metcalfe, gained the trust of their "leaders," gaining information deliberately kept out of the public sphere by the group. The reports are accompanied by stories about events in Germany, nazi action in the US, and results of the Times reports themselves. Everything's published here in the original page layout, with multiple stories per entry.

John Ray Carlson is the pen name for Avedis Boghos Derounian.  His book, "Under Cover," and the American Mercury article "Our Fascist Enemies Within" were based on extensive research, a lot of it under cover, with a number of nazi sympathetic groups in the U.S.

A collection of undercover reportages focused on ideological and religious groups generally hidden from the public eye. 

Brommage spent nearly six months aboard the Montserrat, documenting the voyage of a blackbirder leaving from San Francisco to recruit workers from the Gilbert Islands to work plantations in Guatemala on long-term contracts of indenture. The cover story for the journey was a shipment of coal picked up in British Columbia.  Unlike Melvin's series in the Argus, Brommage's account was full of nasty characters, shady to illegal business practices, abuse and danger. 

Merle Linda Wolin, then the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner's first and only reporter covering Los Angeles's Hispanic community, went undercover as an undocumented sweatshop worker from Portuguese-speaking Brazil, under the name Merlina de Novais.  Over five weeks, she worked three different jobs, even though she had minimal sewing skills.  She spent the better part of a year reporting the story, including the court proceedings over a suit she brought against one of the employers who refused to pay her. 

Conover spent four months living as a tramp, riding the rails, which ultimately became his first book, Rolling Nowhere. Research for the project began for his senior thesis, while still an undergrad at Amherst College, which has awarded him an honorary degree.

Unger, undercover on a tour group led by Tim LaHaye (co-author, the Left Behind series), travels the Holy Land with some of LaHaye's followers.  His reporting examines the connections George W. Bush, then in office, had to Religious Right leaders, and their influence on policy.  The pieces also look at the everyday experience of believers - because Unger did not reveal that he was a reporter on assignment (though he did say he was a writer from New York), he was, he believes, spoken too more freely than he would have been with full disclosure.

In January 1950, Marvel Cooke, the first black and only woman reporter on the staff of The New York Compass, did a reprise of a series she had done for The Crisis in 1935 with Ella Baker -- the first time this method of employing women emerged. Cooke, alone this time, posed as a domestic worker seeking employment by the hour or for a day on a Bronx street corner, where women gathered to find some kind of employment to find out what working through the "slave mart" system meant for those forced into it.

As part of an extensive Wall Street Journal report on dead-end jobs, Tony Horwitz posed as a worker in two poultry processing plants, in many ways the epitome of the "often-unseen harshness of low-wage work." The other two pieces in the Journal series, both available on the Pulitzer Prize site, do not involve undercover poses. Horwitz, however, has used the technique in previous efforts, both to investigate what was happening in the massage parlors of Fort Wayne, as a cub reporter in Indiana, here included, and to get around military restrictions during the Gulf War. He also has dressed to fit in while cultivating sources as he reported on Confederate re-enactment for his later books).

Gloria Steinem's two-part series chronicling the eleven days she spent undercover as a Bunny in Hugh Hefner's New York Playboy Club in 1963.

Cornelia Stratton Parker engaged with low-wage earning women in six different jobs so she could "see the world through their eyes" and for the time being, close her own. Her six-part series appeared in Harper's Magazine between June and December of 1921 and as a book, published by Harper Brothers, the following year.

After graduation from Mount Holyoke, Lillian Pettengill took jobs as a domestic servant to write about her experience in a four-part series for Everybody's Magazine, republished soon after as a book for Doubleday.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas is Ghana's most globally recognized investigative reporter. His work, often in disguise, focuses on exposing corruption.

The sisters-in-law van Vorst made the circuit as ostensible factory girls from the pickle factories of Pittsburgh to the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachuetts and on to the cotton mills of North Carolina. Originally published in a series in Everybody's Magazine in 1902, it became a book, published by Doubleday, the following year. Their starting point was an unapologetic sense of superiority over the wage earners they spent months impersonating, living and working among. Reviewers were quick to point to this approach as both a plus and a minus. As for revelations, they reported on the surprising number of young women whose only reason for working in the factories was near folly -- to earn pocket money for clothes and leisure -- and how that had depressed wages and opportunity for women who needed the jobs to support themselves or their families.

Dorr spent the better part of 1906 and 1907 under contract to Everybody's Magazine to witness and experience the feminization of the trades. She went undercover to work in the accounts division of a department store and as a commercial laundress and then in a number of factories across the country, including manufacturers of shirts, cakes and biscuits, and spun yarn. She struggled with writing for publication and was assigned a collaborator who overtook her command of the project. When the magazine advertised his byline alone for an upcoming series heralded as "The Woman's Invasion," Dorr threatened legal action and her byline was restored. "In the truest sense," she later said, "the articles were not mine."

From the book jacket: "A tale of cold beer and hot graft, in which a team of investigative reporters ran a Chicago tavern to probe corruption-- and pulled off the greatest sting in the city's history." Mirage was the name of the pub and the focus of a 25-part series in the Chicago Sun-Times that, during the Pulitzer Prize deliberations of 1979, put undercover reporting under cloud.

For the Nashville Tennessean in 1968, Nat Caldwell investigated Nashville's privately owned nursing homes in part by reporting above board and in part by posing as an elderly patient to spend a week at three of them.

Bly was one of the most visible and attention-getting exponents of undercover reporting -- "stunt" or "detective" reporting, as this precursor of full-scale investigative work was known in her day -- though by no means the first or the only.

Emmeline Pendennis, under the editorship of Charles Chapin at the New York Evening World, presented herself as Helen King, a young woman who had lost her bags and purse, to produce a series that explored what someone without means in New York City could do to get help.

Life Magazine outed a number of medical quacks in this expose, including Antone Dietemann, with a degree in sanitary engineering, was making on-the-spot diagnoses of illnesses "with a magic wand and an array of containers that hold various body tissues." A patient he diagnosed, Jackie Metcalfe, was actually an undercover agent for the state of California. Outside in a car, Life correspondent Joseph Bride made notes, hearing everything that transpired through a radio transmitter hidden in the agent's purse. Inside, Billy Ray, a photographer for the magazine, posed as the agent's husband to document the encounter. Life collaborated with officials in exchange for the right to publish the photographs.

Reporters, hired to work with phony references in nursing homes for the poor, uncover filthy conditions, unqualified employees (as evidenced by their own hiring), and undignified care of the elderly, often in the name of profit.

Charles Chapin, editor of The Chicago Times, hired Nell Cusak to investigate female working conditions in Chicago's factories.  This 21-part series (published under the byline Nell Nelson) was based on the author's experience working undercover in several Chicago factories.  Nelson named specific factories and managers she encountered, detailing the working conditions after spending only a brief time in each factory. 

Frank Sutherland spends a month at Central State Psychiatric Hospital in Nashville, exposing its inadequate condition. The newspaper first determined there was an empty bed before having him admitted, so as not to take up a needed place, and Sutherland left without notice, but the newspaper alerted authorities on his departure, so no police time would be spent searching for him.

Journalism that required costuming or even physical transformation by reporters reporting on racial, ethnic, gender or social groups not their own.

Among the most common of poses: journalists who elect to live as tramps, the homeless, or the abject poor.

Redpath, Olcott, Richardson and Thomson all went South for the New York Tribune and produced reporting undercover in the run-up to the Civil War.

Stephen Crane's "experiments" in luxury and misery for the New York Press. The poet John Berryman later described Crane's "misery" piece as one of his very finest.

Getschow lived and worked as an oil industry day laborer to expose conditions in the temporary "slave labor camps" throughout the Southwest.

Reporters encounter or inhabit the lives of very hard-laboring others.

Reporters have worked as migrant laborers and shadowed undocumented workers crossing the border into the United States.

Waste, fraud, graft, laxity, dilapidated conditions, corruption: Reporters have often used undercover tactics to investigate.

Journalists who infiltrated U.S.-based Nazi bunds, the Ku Klux Klan, the Gomorrah, and other secret societies and closed groups.

Reporters have presented as teachers or students to get an inside view of what goes on in schools and colleges.

Reporters have taken the undercover route from slaughterhouses and chicken- and pork-processing plants to fast-food chains and supermarkets to understand the system.

Ted Conover's work revolves around immersion forays into a variety of subject areas, including America's hoboes, illegal immigration, prisons, Aspen, Colorado, and on the world's iconic roads.

The broad outlines of what happened are well known: To verify reports from seventy different sources of unsanitary practices at Food Lion supermarkets, producers for the ABC newsmagazine Prime Time Live took jobs as supermarket workers and went to work with tiny concealed cameras turned on. The resulting broadcast aired November 5, 1992, replete with gross but powerful footage of employees in such questionable acts as redating expired meats and poultry, trimming pork with spoiled edges to repackage for longer sale, marinating chicken in water and liquid that hadn’t been changed for days, and slicing slimy turkey and coating it in barbecue sauce to resell as a gourmet special.  

In efforts to get inside the fold, reporters have fellow-traveled with religious groups, posing as members or prospective recruits.

Original "Harvest of Shame" documentary (not undercover but highly influential in subsequent efforts that involved the 'worked as' technique) and a follow-up fifty years later, both by CBS News.

A six-part series involving reporters going undercover to work in the turpentine woods and as a motel maid as part of a deep examination of the underpaid worker in Georgia.

The series was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won a local Emmy award for WLS-TV. "Cashing in on crashes. "Thousands collect each year. They fake injuries and turn minor bump-and-bruise automobile accidents into an estimated $3 billion annual bonanza. "That is the accident swindle. It is masterminded by unscrupulous lawyers and ambulance chasers. They tell their clients how to fake pain. They are aided by crooked clinics and doctors eager to play along for profit. "During an eight-month investigation, reporters from the Sun-Times and WLS-TV (Channel 7) infiltrated the swindle and learned how it works. "With the cooperation of the Chicago Police Department and Allstate Insurance, reporters posed as victims of minor automobile accidents that never occurred. . . ." Editor Ralph Otwell described the project as having "documented the fraudulent legal and medical practices which add one-third higher premiums to every driver's insurance bill. "

Dale Brazao went undercover for the Toronto Star to investigate revolting, intolerable conditions at a local retirement home.