In The Elements of Journalism, the authors talked about the spirit of transparency. They stated that "Journalists should engage in masquerade only if there is no other way to get the story." I'm still not sure that what kind of situations journalists can engage in masquerade.
For example, If one of my credible sources told me that a doctor often charged extra money from their patients. Can I pretend to be a patient and shoot the conversation secretly? I know the law stated that doctors have privacy in their office, and this way is always debated. But it is probably the best way to get the information I want. Can I pretend to be a patient?
Another example is a case that happened in China. In recent years, about 20 Chinese employees who worked for Foxconn Technology Group committed suicide. Many media companies reported those suicide cases but could not dig deeply. In order to get more information, an intern from Southern Weekly, a famous investigative newspaper in China, passed the companies' interview and became one of their employees. The intern stayed there over 40 days. He talked to several employees to gather information and recorded secretly. After that, he wrote an investigative news about the employees' life. In this investigative news, he also explained how he got these information. Was his performance acceptable?
Also about the anonymity, does every article which contains anonymous sources have to explain why they choose anonymity?
I thought this part of the reading was also very shocking and interesting. I didn't quite understand how it's possible for it to be ok for journalists to deceive a source in order to obtain certain information. I think this kind of relates to the mistrust that a lot of citizens have for journalists. When journalists have to use masquerade or pretend to be someone else to get the information it seems sneaky and I believe the public would have a hard time getting past that aspect of a journalist's article, whether his/her article is reporting the truth or not.
ReplyDelete"Going undercover" or "masquerade" is a technique of last resort, acceptable only during investigative reporting going after significant, high impact stories. Working conditions at Foxconn, for example, are now widely known to have been inhumane in the extreme. Closer to home, author Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover for two years, hiding the fact that she has a PhD in science to obtain some of the lowest wage jobs in America (motel chambermaid, waitress, etc. She wrote about this in her book Nickel and Dimed. This is not the norm for reporters.
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