A modo de cierre

easily be abused, and because there is a fine line between subterfuge and entrapment.

In 1999, a British aristocrat and his friend were charged with drug use after front page revelations by The News of the World

— a flagship title of the Rupert Murdoch empire. The evidence was overwhelming — they were caught on camera snorting the drug. However, the prosecution case rested entirely on video footage shot by an under-cover team of journalists.

The jury felt uncomfortable about the elaborate “sting” used by journalists to encourage the offence — clearly feeling that if the journalists had not been present, the offence would not have taken place.

They told the judge when returning a guilty verdict that if they had been allowed to take the actions of the journalists into account the men would have been acquitted. The judge expressed his sympathy for this view by handing out suspended sentences on convictions that would normally have put the men in jail and he pointedly gave the jour-nalists a warning about their conduct.

Subterfuge is a technique that should surely be used sparingly because it can too easily be abused, and because of the fine line between subterfuge and entrapment.

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Just as journalists furiously resent police or public authorities rifling through their contacts books and files on the off chance that some morsels of potential evidence may emerge, journalists need to have some prima facie evidence to justify the use of subterfuge.

The use of clandestine listening devices and video cameras on the off-chance of dis-covering wrong-doing — “fishing” for stories

— can never be justified. Plying people with drinks or encouraging them to commits acts of mischief is not investigative journalism.

Entrapment may delight readers or view-ers and bring in revenue for cash-starved networks, but when the details behind the operation become known they often arouse public distaste.

However, deceptive journalism is not harmful practice per se, providing that those taking part understand that they must have good reason for their actions and be able to explain these later. Where deception is required in order to tell the truth, it can only be justified if it is genuinely aimed at exposing corruption and the people who practice it.

In most countries incitement to commit a crime is a crime in itself and journalists play with fire if they ignore the fact. Journal-ists also have to be conscious of the dangers in co-operating with people who themselves

are breaking laws. If there is no public interest offence, journalists too can be pros-ecuted.

In the Pentagon Papers case, for exam-ple, first The New York Times and then The Washington Post actively colluded with a law-breaking public official in the prepara-tion of a series of articles based on a secret Defence Department history of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam war.

They had been provided the documents by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defence Depart-ment and Rand Corporation official who had come to loathe the war and who, while still engaged in government work, secretly cop-ied classifcop-ied papers.

These revealed that, for years, succes-sive administrations had made decisions at the highest level in ways that deliberately deceived the nation over the Vietnam War.

The White House and government depart-ments were systematically lying to the people.

The government asked the courts to restrain publication but when the case finally reached the Supreme Court in June 1971, the court ruled in favour of journalists, despite the fact that Ellsberg had broken the law and that the newspapers were impli-cated in these offences.

Part of the court verdict, which reso-nates with the role of the governments of the

SWEATSHOP SCOOPS: Undercover reporting has exposed child labour scandals.© Khemka A.

United States and the United Kingdom in dealing with evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, spelled out why the public interest takes precedence in situa-tions like this. Justice Hugo Black said:

“Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die… far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended …”

In recent years undercover journalism has exposed corruption in high places, maltreat-ment of asylum seekers and sweatshop conditions in factories. In 2007, for instance, The Observer in London and the German television network WDR went undercover to film and report on the hardships faced by young workers in the back streets of New Delhi where unscrupulous sub-contractors were employing children in conditions close to slavery to supply goods for Gap, one of the world’s leading fashion retailers. This was flagrant violation of the company’s rigorous social audit system launched in 2004 to weed out child labour in its production processes.

Similar methods were used by journalists working on the 2005 BBC production Asylum Undercover — The Real Story?, which reveal-ing evidence of racism and a culture of vio-lence towards detainees in the UK’s asylum system, and was based upon the work of two journalists who spent three months working undercover in a detention centre.

Many stories like this could not be told without an element of deceit on the part of journalists. But they and their colleagues understand that investigative journalism at its best is never entered into lightly — all journalists and their media must be ready to justify their actions, they must have a strategy for disclosure to the public and all parties involved, and they must remain dedi-cated to the principle of honest dealing.

In normal dealings with sources and contacts, ethical journalists tell their own truth about their intentions and their objec-tives. They do not dupe or con people into

embarrassing or humiliating circumstances, they do not use duplicity to get access to vulnerable people, they do not lie or give misleading impressions about how they will use the information they obtain.

That is not always easy, because some-times journalists start out with the best of intentions but come across information which they feel obliged to reveal, and this may hurt and anger their sources.

One journalist who felt the sting of rebuke from an unhappy source is Åsne Seierstad, the Norwegian foreign corre-spondent, who built a formidable reputation with daring reporting from the frontline of the Iraq war and then, internationally, with the publication of her best-selling book The Bookseller of Kabul, a touching and percep-tive story of a family in Afghanistan with whom she stayed for some months in 2002.

The book was acclaimed for its finely-drawn portrait of the patriarchal bookseller — intel-lectually refined and politically astute in his

lEBaNoN

Journalists in lebanon in 2006 turned themselves into rescue workers when they were the first to arrive in the stricken villages of the south after the Israeli bombardment. When a convoy of reporters from Beirut arrived at the strategically important town of Bint Jbail they found people wounded and helpless, without food and water. the town had been virtually destroyed after four weeks of ground assaults as well as pounding by Israeli artillery. no humanitarian organisations had arrived.

omar nashabeh, a lebanese journalist for the paper al akhbar, says the dozen or so international journalists he was travelling with were pulling people from the rubble, giving them water and first aid and taking them to hospitals. “We just had to help,” he said. “It is a big dilemma: if you see someone dying do you help them or photograph them? the photographers and video cameramen put their equipment aside to help. In some villages we were the only people who could; the red cross would not go because it was too unsafe. We had no stretchers so carried people on a ladder that we found.”

dealings with the outside world, but harsh and forbidding at home with his family. This insight may have struck a chord at the time with many in the west, but the bookseller was furious, accusing her of distortion, betraying his trust and abusing the family’s hospitality. His anger led him to write a book of his own challenging her account.

When Seierstadt published a later work

— Angels of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgot‑

ten War — based upon her experiences in

Chechnya and time spent examining the plight of children in the conflict, many of them deeply troubled victims of war and ter-rorism, she was at pains to avoid any misun-derstanding. This time, Seierstadt writes, she showed the portions of the book to the car-ers of children whose lives she followed to get approval for her accounts. She changed the names of all the children and let the adults decide for themselves whether they wanted to be identified.²⁹

The whole European press and media industry is in flux, but in France the crisis is at its most acute. The iconic brands of the French national press, Le Monde and Liberation, are in perpetual crisis, the public broadcasting system is stripped of its capacity to earn much-needed revenue, and although the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has put media reform on the agenda, there is deep suspicion that he intends to deliver more control over the country’s media to industrialists who have already pocketed the print and broadcasting jewels.

Nevertheless, rebellion is in the air. An unprecedented coalition of media unions, journalists and civil society groups are mounting a concerted campaign to shape a people-centred media strategy that will stop the manipulation of French media policy and journalism by political and business interest.

In 2007, French journalists and their unions mobilised national action to defend journalism and strengthen quality. The points of crisis they identify are:

E media concentration: industrialists such as Bouygues (public works), Dassault (aeronautics) and Lagardère (arms) use the media they own and their friendship with the President for their own business interests

E Public service broadcasting: the paltry income from the licence fee (the lowest in Western Europe and not increased since the mid-1990s) and attacks on advertising income have generated speculation over its capacity to survive

E working conditions: cuts and under-funding has seen the near extinction of investigative journalism, while harsh employment regimes increase the workload of journalists who struggle to maintain standards

E Civil liberties: France has been a serial offender at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where it has