These are examples of undercover reportage that were considered to have crossed ethical lines or that caused major legal wrangles.
Reporters have presented as teachers or students to get an inside view of what goes on in schools and colleges.
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.
Journalists have devised any number of ruses to get inside hospitals and clinics -- as patients or staff members.
Journalists who infiltrated U.S.-based Nazi bunds, the Ku Klux Klan, the Gomorrah, and other secret societies and closed groups.
From 1968 to present day, reporters have gone undercover to expose the corruption and mistreatment that occurs within nursing homes.
Among the most common of poses: journalists who elect to live as tramps, the homeless, or the abject poor.
A gathering of the undercover and experiential reporting of Elizabeth Cochrane, later Seaman, who wrote under the pen name of Nellie Bly.
