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Lost art of infiltration

No one in a newsroom today would dare suggest that a reporter get information through any kind of subterfuge and certainly not by secretly getting a job in the ranks of the target of a newspaper investigation. Such thoughts made the newspapers’ lawyers very nervous in the 1970s and today I fear they would respond with derision. Today there is something called ethics that we thought of in Chicago in the 1970s as a poor excuse for not getting the story. Also today, common sense tells one that if a patient in a nursing home or hospital was injured in the course of medical care and it turned out that the orderly handling the patient was a reporter untrained in health care, it would cause a nightmare of litigation that would be discussed in law schools throughout the century. But such adventures did occur at the major newspapers in Chicago and I saw the idea develop, hit its stride, and then pass away. As a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I went undercover and reported on my experiences in seven undercover jobs from 1973 until 1979. I had been a police reporter in the suburbs in the sixties when the Tribune had no designated investigative reporters. However, George Bliss, who had won a Pulitzer for an exposé of the Metropolitan Sanitary District in 1963, had important sources and worked up many investigations. He would go into a bar dressed like a carpenter with a hammer and nail pouch hanging on his belt and place a numbers bet. He would write up a few such incidents as a report of wide open gambling in the suburbs. The next day, he would want a follow-up story and would ask me to ‘get the state’s attorney to say’ that he was going to start an investigation. I called the state’s attorney and was lectured on the fact that Bliss had written in a previous story reporting that the state’s attorney was going to follow up on the exposé when he actually had said no such thing. The state’s attorney told me that there was an ongoing investigation of illegal gambling and Bliss’ article had nothing to do with it. Journalism