Waste, fraud, graft, laxity, dilapidated conditions, corruption: Reporters have often used undercover tactics to investigate.
These are examples of undercover reportage that were considered to have crossed ethical lines or that caused major legal wrangles.
Among the most common of poses: journalists who elect to live as tramps, the homeless, or the abject poor.
Redpath, Olcott, Richardson and Thomson all went South for the New York Tribune and produced reporting undercover in the run-up to the Civil War.
Journalists who infiltrated U.S.-based Nazi bunds, the Ku Klux Klan, the Gomorrah, and other secret societies and closed groups.
These are stings to expose scam artists, quacks and hucksters who prey on the needs or naivete of their customers, clients, or patients.
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.
