San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Undercover journalism is a necessity
Project Veritas is an activist group on the political right that has built a roguish reputation by luring liberals into saying things that, recorded in secret and edited with malevolence, become public embarrassments. For more than a decade it has targeted such organizations as the community advocates ACORN, Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio, costing people their jobs and bringing mirth to those who love to see liberals look bad.
Veritas is in the news because it just lost a suit brought by a progressive political consultancy, Democracy Partners, which Veritas operatives tried to hoodwink into agreeing to illegal and improper election manipulation. Veritas claimed, as it routinely does, that when it infiltrated people using phony credentials and offered money to try to get their targets to commit to sleazy things so Veritas could expose them, it was practicing journalism.
It must now pay Democracy Partners $120,000 for the deceit and betrayal that went into the failed sting. That isn’t a big deal for Veritas, which raised $22 million in 2020 alone, but it may be a bigger deal in quite another way: For the powerful message it sends about the future of a tradition of hard-knuckle journalism that has fallen out of favor — but which we may actually need now more than ever.
Now, it was tempting to see the verdict from a Washington, D.C., jury as an authoritative rebuke, almost an official finding that whatever it is that Veritas does, it’s not journalism. Hence the Washington Post’s headline on its media critic Erik Wemple’s column: “Verdict upends Project Veritas’s journalism defense.”
The implication is the court nailed Veritas because it found they aren’t really reporters, that they are a band of ideologues who engage in something like reporting only so they can tart up the fabrications they were determined to publish with a sprinkling of fact — that they gathered information dishonestly to use in dishonest ways.
But the court didn’t do that. The case didn’t address the lies Veritas sought to tell; it was confined to condemning the subterfuge Veritas resorted to. Veritas owes Democracy Partners damages because it trespassed on their premises, because its operative fraudulently misrepresented herself by lying about her credentials and because it engaged in illegal wiretapping by secretly recording conversations.
Nasty stuff, to be sure. But here’s the problem: There’s no reason to think that the verdict would have been any different if the acts had been committed not by Veritas, but by a tough-minded, bona fide news organization. And if its target weren’t an innocuous Beltway consultancy, but a predatory and secretive multinational with darkly destructive overseas operations that leave its coerced workforce half-starved and virgin forests in ruins.
And that the journalistic result would be not a deceptively edited hatchet job, but a thorough, deeply researched exposé with explosive, and broadly valuable, impact — which could never have been reported without dishonesty.
Undercover reporting has fallen on hard times, and nowadays reporters are trained to regard it as all but impermissible. But it has yielded work of real value, ever since Nellie Bly had herself committed so she could expose conditions in a mental institution for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1887. The most audacious in the post-war era was the Mirage Tavern project in 1977, when Chicago Sun-Times reporters masqueraded as barkeeps and set up a saloon that was shaken down for payoffs by city inspectors, duly chronicled in a 25-part series that got a third of the city’s electrical inspectors indicted. In 2007, Harper’s Magazine Washington Editor Ken Silverstein posed as a representative of a Central Asian despot and trolled for PR services among some of the capital’s top lobbying firms, reporting the ingenuity and eagerness with which Beltway opinion shapers proposed to help a dictator dispel a rancid reputation.
True, deception was never universally embraced. The Washington Post’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, helped block the Sun-Times from getting a Pulitzer for Mirage on grounds that it was reported unethically, and Silverstein had his critics, too. The public was thought to be opposed, and journalism leaders noted with alarm ABC News’ experience in its 1992 “PrimeTime Live” investigation of food handling at Food Lion supermarkets. There, evidence from hidden cameras of fetid poultry being scrubbed for sale wasn’t enough to keep jurors from finding against ABC for lying to the supermarket to get its reporters hired.
Publishers, too, sometimes lost their nerve. In the Chiquita case, the Cincinnati Enquirer published an 18-page report in 1998 based on months of research and detailing extravagant wrongdoing in Central America — labor abuses, environmental degradation, bribery — by the corporate giant formerly known as United Fruit. But the paper’s owner — Gannett Co., the country’s largest newspaper chain — caved ignominiously when it learned that one of the reporters had secretly hacked into Chiquita’s in-house voicemail. Gannett apologized profusely, retracted the story in its entirety, fired one of the reporters and forced out their editor, cost their main confidential source — Chiquita’s in-house lawyer — his job and paid more than $10 million in damages. The story’s veracity was never addressed and was entirely overshadowed by the tactics used to get it.
Which is the conundrum the Project Veritas verdict raises. It is an easy target because it is forthright about its zealotry and uses the material it gathers in ways that are, to me, despicable and fundamentally dishonest.
But it’s not worth slapping Veritas around if the same verdict makes it harder for real reporters to do their jobs. We live amid vast information overload, but, paradoxically, more and more of the facts that truly matter are less and less obtainable. Governmental secrecy is applied and enforced ruthlessly, and businesses routinely muzzle employees with nondisclosure agreements and other instruments of corporate muscle to shut them up.
That said, deception is always distasteful and should be rare, used only when the story is important enough and can’t be gotten otherwise, and should be applied sparingly to avoid harming the innocent. But sometimes you have to lie to get past the receptionist to see the bodies out back. Their story must be told.
It would be a sweet victory for Project Veritas if its own deceptions provoke reprisals that end up crippling the press it so reviles.