Undercover Reporting

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.

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.

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.

One of the best-remembered undercover investigations of all time. Nellie Bly feigns insanity to get herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island.

Wells had herself admitted to Larned State Hospital in Larned, Kansas, for an investigation of the Kansas mental health system. She stayed eight days and produced this February 1974 series for the Wichita Eagle and the Wichita Beacon.(Special thanks to Prof. Dan Close at Wichita State University for helping to unearth and then retrieve these pieces from the Eagle microfilm.)