‘Lipstick Camera’ Reshapes TV Investigative Journalism

The “lipstick camera” may have changed the face of investigative journalism, at least on television.

Today’s mini video cameras, some the size of a lipstick canister, can be hidden in a reporter’s baseball cap or a producer’s wig, and they give television news an easy way to sneak the viewer behind the scenes. Child pornography via the Internet, lax airport security and unclean fast food joints have all been subjected to the probing of undercover journalists armed with the tiny devices.

But this micro-technology has also revived an old ethical question: When is a story so important that a journalist must deceive to tell the truth?

For ABC News, the question is especially crucial these days, as the TV network awaits a North Carolina jury’s decision on how much it should pay Food Lion Inc., for a 1992 story about the grocery store chain.

The federal jury decided last month that ABC had trespassed and committed fraud during a “PrimeTime Live” segment that used undercover reporters and hidden cameras to document charges that some stores sold tainted meat and overripe fish.

Food Lion, which denies any unclean or unsafe food practices, did not challenge the truth of ABC’s report in court by suing for libel--a difficult charge to prove in most cases. Instead, the company, which has 1,100 stores in 14 states, argued successfully that it was defrauded by ABC reporters, who misled Food Lion’s personnel office to gain access to company premises.

“They were using Food Lion as a sound stage,” Donna Walters, a spokeswoman for the grocery company, said last week.

A sizable monetary award to Food Lion would send a powerful message. The verdict has already raised an outcry from some media advocates who see it as an erosion of constitutional protections for the media. But others hope that the Food Lion case will force journalists to reexamine whether they should misrepresent themselves, or even lie, to get a higher truth.

On one end of the spectrum is Clifford G. Christians, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois who believes undercover journalism should be avoided except in extreme cases.

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“Journalism is centered on the question of truth,” said Christians, who is an expert on media ethics. “Just as justice is to politics and healing is to medicine, so is truth the essence of good journalism and deception is the opposite of it.”

On the other side is Mitchell Stephens, chairman of the journalism department at New York University, who suggests that any simple rule banning undercover work would not serve the public or the media very well.

“There are a lot of things that would never have been uncovered if reporters didn’t go undercover,” Stephens said.

For example, he said, the horrors of New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum in the late 1880s would never have been revealed unless Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, had not got herself committed to the asylum. Her columns were called “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” and they are among the classics in American investigative reporting.

“I’m concerned about a world where this technique is overused . . . “ but I think I’m more concerned about a world where it was not allowed at all,” Stephens said.

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In general, most newspapers don’t allow undercover work at all. Some allow it in extreme cases, such as the Miami Herald’s investigation of housing discrimination several years ago.

The paper got black and white reporters to apply for rentals to determine whether race was a factor in approval for apartments. Journalists gave their real names and their corporation (in this case Knight-Ridder), but they did not say they were working on a story for the Herald.

But even such cases are rare for newspapers, especially since the late 1970s, when the Chicago Sun Times experimented with several undercover stories and drew criticism from many of the nation’s top editors and media experts as a result.

In one case, the newspaper, CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” and Chicago’s Better Government Assn. set up a bar they called the Mirage. Once opened, the camera and undercover journalists watched as various city officials demanded bribes for their services (including looking the other way about code violations).

Similarly, in 1978, the newspaper used undercover techniques to determine whether several clinics in downtown Chicago were performing costly abortions on women who were not pregnant.

Female journalists went to the clinic and took urine samples from men for their pregnancy tests. The clinic reported back that some samples tested positive for pregnancy.

Still, neither the Mirage nor abortion stories won the much-coveted Pulitzer Prize. This omission was viewed as a highly public slap at the Sun-Times and clear notice to other newspaper journalists that such methods were not acceptable.

But if the print media have shied away from undercover work in recent years, television has moved in the opposite direction.

“In years past, it was much more difficult to go undercover with a video camera, but now these cameras can fit in . . . the end of a ballpoint pen,” said Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Christians, using a system outlined by Sissela Bok in her book “Lying,” said that before any use of subterfuge, a journalist should ask three questions: First, have you tried everything else? Two, can you come up with some moral principle, some ethical issue that is so important it justifies deception? Three, can you justify it to the person or people like the one you will deceive so that eventually they can say, “I don’t like it, but I see why you did it.”?

“I fear that the technology and the function of getting something done visually have overrun the moral imperative here,” Christians said.

At the networks, officials argued that the use of undercover journalism is always considered serious. Neal Shapiro, executive producer of “Dateline NBC,” said such work must be approved by a series of executives up to a vice president.

Overall, cameras are hidden for about 3% of the news segments, he said.

“But the advantage of hidden cameras, if edited responsibly, is that the viewer gets to judge what’s happening for himself,” Shapiro said.