“I am an elegant and beautiful lady. I consider myself a good housewife. I would like to meet intelligent, passionate and romantic man.” Next to this description is a photo of a smiling, young Russian blonde wearing a cleavage-revealing black dress and holding her hands between her closed inner thighs. Interested? Then click on “Add Eleonora to My Order.”
A Foreign Affair, which has thousands of listings like Eleonora’s, is a company that for a few thousand dollars offers two-week tours of Russia, Ukraine and other countries where American men can meet hundreds of women whom they can bring back to the States as brides.
In Dec. 2005, journalist Kris Garin went on A Foreign Affair tour of Ukraine under the pretense of finding a bride. His story was published in the June issue of Harper’s as “A Foreign Affair: On the Great Ukrainian Bride Hunt.”
Whether undercover reporting is a legitimate form of journalism depends on whom you ask. Some publications have ethical guidelines that restrict or prohibit the practice, and many reporters, editors and lawyers throughout the country disagree about what its role should be in journalism. In particular, they disagree whether it’s okay to lie to get to the truth in the name of public interest and whether this can damage a publication’s credibility. But even the harshest critics of undercover reporting agree that almost every case is different.
Garin said that the only way to get his story was to go undercover. “It’s a story you’d never be able to get and an insight you’d never be able to get if you said, ‘Listen, I’m a reporter. Can I tag along with you guys?’” he said in an interview.
A farmer from the Southwest told Garin about how his wife, a former “Mexican call girl,” left him. A gray-haired, impeccably dressed Midwesterner confessed he wasn’t really looking for a bride and was more interested in the prostitutes. Another man told him how lonely he was. And there were many more.
“I’m not morally offended by what they did at Harper’s, and as a reader I might very much enjoy it,” said veteran New York Times reporter Bill Glaberson, who was a lawyer prior to entering journalism. “I don’t have a black-and-white rule.”
Glaberson also said he’s glad the policy of his newspaper is not to “trick people.” The Times’ 50-page code of ethics states: “Staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover, though they need not always announce their status as journalists when seeking information available to the public.” Although food and travel critics are exempt to avoid special treatment, as a general rule the Times does not practice undercover reporting.
“There is something a little different about being the premier newspaper in the United States – or maybe the world,” said Glaberson. “Readers have an extremely high expectation of the Times. That’s why, when we stray, like with Jayson Blair and Judith Miller,” it’s a bigger deal than when magazines like The New Republic or Newsweek stray. The Times may not get a richly detailed story like Garin’s as a result of its policy, he added, but the paper’s “reputation of extreme integrity” gives him access to people who wouldn’t trust just any reporter.
Garin, who is a freelance journalist, said that if he were a part of a large news organization like the Times, he would “probably have a much more conservative stance” on undercover reporting. But does a publication that allows undercover reporting necessarily lose credibility?
In 1989, several editors at Newsday came to then-managing editor Howard Schneider and proposed a plan to uncover racial discrimination in Long Island’s real estate industry. They wanted to send black and white reporters undercover – pretending to be customers – to about 200 real estate offices. Skeptical in the beginning, Schneider realized that it was the last resort. “We were getting nowhere,” he recalled. “We were getting people accusing the real estate industry of racial steering and the realtors saying, ‘We’re not racial steering, people are making choices.’”
Schneider’s view of undercover reporting hasn’t changed: “It should only be done under extraordinary circumstances,” he said. “Sometimes when it’s done on the 11 o’clock news or as an attention grabber, it’s fraught with problems, and it cheapens the journalism, and it’s lazy.”
After 10 months of detailed planning, however, editor Anthony Marro decided not to go through with it. It wasn’t just about concerns over credibility. The logistics were “messy,” said Schnieder. A year later, Newsday ran a series of articles with personal accounts and statistics to demonstrate the facts of segregation on Long Island.
Undercover reporting has played a key role in many well-known stories of great public interest, but for some this justification has not satisfied concerns over credibility. In 1979, The Chicago Sun-Times bought a tavern and used it as a front to expose pervasive government corruption. While the “bartenders” served drinks, photographers took pictures of officials taking bribes. In the mid-’90s, two reporters for the Nashville Tennessean spent a month living in a housing project to collect information about what life was like in poor areas of Nashville. According to an Editor and Publisher article from 1995, the reporters did not identify themselves as such and ended up using the names and pictures of some residents. A few years ago, BBC reporter Mark Daly signed up as a recruit at a police academy in England to investigate institutional racism within the police force. Prior to going undercover, these journalists said they had evidence but not enough to make a strong, conclusive argument.
Garin and his editors at Harper’s decided he had to go undercover because it was the best way to find out what the industry was like and what motivated these men. “What they really wanted,” he wrote in the article, “and what most imagined they would find in Ukraine, was a fusion of 1950s gender sensibilities with 21st century hyper-sexuality.”
Although the article offers a unique insight into a world most people are unaware of, were the means justifiable? “If you’re weighing the question, you first have to consider the damage of the means,” said Garin. “If you’re just telling a story, and you’re not exposing any individuals to any embarrassment or scrutiny or not identifying them at all, I’m not sure you really need an end to justify that.”
Garin’s main concern was keeping the identities of the men on the tour private. In the article, He doesn’t even identify them by first name. He said it would be “cruel and inappropriate” to expose them and it would add nothing to the story.
The men did not know Garin was a journalist – he used his real name but said he was in advertising – or that he was audio recording almost everything they told him. (Garin said he spoke with a Ukrainian lawyer to make sure surreptitious recording is legal in Ukraine prior to his flight.)
Whether or not he broke a criminal statute is not the only issue, said David Tomlin, associate general counsel for The Associated Press. Invasion of privacy or fraud could be brought in a civil suit, said Tomlin, and even though the reporting took place in Ukraine, legal action could potentially be brought in any country the article had been published.
Martin London, a lawyer who has successfully sued the media on privacy issues and regards undercover reporting as “offensive in varying degrees,” said he doesn’t see a big problem with what Garin did. Although the men on the tour had an “expectation of privacy,” their relationship with Garin wasn’t like a relationship between a lawyer and a client or a patient and a doctor. On the other hand, London said he does not believe the reporter should be the judge of where a relationship is on the privacy scale. Generally speaking, video, photography, tape recording, and the ability to do it all covertly “exacerbate the invasion,” he said.
Ironically, Garin’s surreptitious tape recording actually allowed Harper’s not to reveal the names of the individuals involved, said Garin. From a fact-checking standpoint, not using a tape recorder may have made it more difficult to keep the men’s names out of the story.
“No one but my editors (and fact-checkers) ever heard the tape,” he said in an e-mail, “so I don’t see that using the technology did anything other than ensure the story’s accuracy, credibility and ultimately – counter-intuitive though it may be – the privacy of its subjects.”
