Deception for Journalism's Sake: A Database

Deception for Journalism's Sake: A Database

Deep Encounters with Religious Groups

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

Christian, evangelicals, posed as, presented as, religious right

Asylums Undercover

Since the 1870s, journalists have been posing as patients or attendants to expose horrid conditions and treatment inside mental hospitals. Nellie Bly, incidentally, was not the first. 

asylums, insane asylum, posed as, worked as

"Blackbirding" - The Slave System's Just-as-Evil Twin?

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.

colonialism, George Morrison, indenture, J.D. Melvin, missionaries, San Francisco Chronicle, slave ships, slavery, The Age, The Argus, the south, Undercover, W.H. Brommage

Watchdogs in the Public Interest

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

graft, insurance, lobbyists, posed as, poverty programs, trucking, vote fraud, Welfare, worked as

Journalistic Acts of Race, Class, Ethnic and Gender Impersonation

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

became, Black Like Me, Hispanic, Native American, posed as, posed as black, race

Homelessness, Down-and-Out, Broke

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

hoboes, homelessness, lived among, lived among, posed as, posed as, tramps

Nellie Bly of The New York World

A gathering of the undercover and experiential reporting of Elizabeth Cochrane, later Seaman, who wrote under the pen name of Nellie Bly.

Nellie Bly, posed as