In 2007, the Washington Post published the first in a blockbuster investigative series by reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest on the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Within a day after the series began, work crews were on-site upgrading the mold-and rodent-infested outpatient facilities. Within weeks, the hospital’s commander, the secretary of the Army, and the Army’s surgeon general had lost their jobs. Congress scheduled special field subcommittee hearings on-site at the hospital, inviting testimony from some of the reporters’ named sources. Three blue-ribbon panels began investigating how wounded U.S. soldiers who had served their country so valiantly could be treated so badly under the Army’s own watch.

Praise was nearly universal for the work of two reporters and photographer Michel duCille, and it was no surprise the following year when they won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Leonard Downie, Jr., the newspaper’s executive editor at the time, captured best the underlying meaning of their triumph at a time when economic and technological convulsions in the traditional delivery of news had put at risk the very survival of serious, intensively reported journalism, the kind that requires unique skill and training undergirded by large commitments of time and money. To the Pulitzer judges, Downie wrote, “At its core, truly great journalism is about righting wrongs and changing systems that are unfair or do not work.” His reporters had done exactly that. The newspaper, indeed the whole profession, proudly—deservedly—celebrated the achievement. Priest and Hull had spent more than four months doing journalism in the public interest at its shining, steam-blasted best.

In the rush to extol the series and its impact, no one gave more than glancing notice to how the two reporters had managed to gain and maintain such unfettered access to a U.S. military institution, let alone a military hospital, over so many months. Only the sparest details of how-they-got-that-story trickled out in those early weeks, the period when interest was keenest. To readers, Hull and Priest reported on their method in a single sentence, as Downie, who opposes misrepresentation and undercover reporting, later similarly explained to the Pulitzer judges in his letter of nomination.

He said their more than four months at Walter Reed was spent without official knowledge or permission. They declined to discuss method with the Post’s own media columnist or with a reporter for the American Journalism Review. At the gentle urging of a public radio interviewer, they gave up just a bit more. “I mean we didn’t go through the Army for permission, nor did we go through Walter Reed,” Hull said. “We went to the soldiers, removing that middle filter, because we wanted to hear what their lives were like, and we wanted to witness these problems firsthand, and that required lots of time with these people as they went through their days.”

At about the same time, the Post’s ombudsman reported that “The two set out, mostly separately and never undercover, and did the kind of plain old gumshoe on-the-­record reporting that often goes unrecognized in this high-tech age.” She quoted Priest, saying of Army officials: “No one was really paying attention,” which allowed the two reporters to stay “below the radar for as long as we did.”

The ombudsman’s framing of the enterprise as “never undercover” provoked no counter argument. But was that really the case? Only a few bloggers, apparently indifferent to the U-word’s burdensome implications, praised the Post with compound off-handed references to its “undercover reporting,” “undercover investigation,” or “undercover reporters,” but that was about it.

Thirteen months after the series was published, at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism and in interviews closer to the time of the Pulitzer announcement, Hull and Priest provided a fuller explanation of how they had so deliberately and effectively avoided detection until they were ready to reveal themselves to Walter Reed officials six days before the first story ran.

It meant:

• Identifying themselves at the guard gates with their driver’s licenses, as every ordinary visitor to the hospital does.
• Not announcing their Post affiliations or declaring their real intentions to anyone who might then be obliged to thwart their actual purpose.
• Avoiding unwelcome questions by playing on the common assumptions and expectations of officials who encountered them in the hospital environment.
• Constant vigilance and a series of stealth moves designed to help them blend in unremarkably with the surroundings, making themselves scarce whenever those who might question their presence or, worse, kick them out, appeared on the scene. It meant separating, so one could continue reporting in case the other got caught.
• Taking pains not to reveal their actual purpose to anyone who would be obliged to report them.
• Intentionally shedding such tools of the trade as cameras and reporters’ notebooks so they would not raise unwelcome questions during routine bag searches.
• Imploring the trusted sources they developed during those four-plus months not to reveal what they had learned of the reporters’ purpose or even to acknowledge the reporters personally should they meet up by chance on the hospital grounds.
• Helping their sources understand how to avoid inadvertently giving the reporters away, including careful coaching in “phraseology”—Hull’s term—for themselves and for the soldiers, families, and hospital personnel whom they took into their confidence.

Key for Hull and Priest was to steer authorities away from asking awkward questions to which truthful answers would be required under ethical and policy guidelines common to journalists, the military, and hospital personnel alike. Key also was to be free to “roam around the 110-acre facility at various hours of the day or night and talk to soldiers and Marines without the interference of Army public affairs.” Undercover assignments often require this approach. Also key was the end goal: to be in a position to create the kind of impact in print that would force Walter Reed to respond to the urgent, repeated complaints from patients and their families that it had ignored for far too long.

The extraordinary potency of the series eliminated the need to further justify why the clandestine behavior had been necessary, but it came nonetheless a month after their first stories appeared—in the form of a Philadelphia parable. A local television crew, attempting to replicate the Post’s successful work at a Veterans Administration hospital in Philadelphia, fell into the trap of exposure-too-soon that Hull and Priest had so carefully finessed. That crew was detained and fined, and had its cameras and film confiscated. On top of that, no story resulted, except an embarrassing one about the crew’s arrest for staging what local media reports described as “an unknown undercover investigation.” More to the point, there were no meaningful results to show for the botched effort.

It is a fact that Priest and Hull met the minimum requirement and common understanding of most reporters, as contained implicitly or explicitly in every journalistic code of ethics. That is, the obligation to be upfront when confronted and never to tell an outright lie. And clearly, Priest and Hull at all times were prepared to identify themselves as reporters should the direct question ever be put to them. To their great relief, it was not.

They entered a public place they had every right to enter. They identified themselves with a driver’s license, like everyone else. Open to debate, however, is whether there is really a difference for a journalist between not ever telling a lie—emphasis on the word telling, because lies, to qualify as lies, are verbalized or written—and the deliberate projection of a false impression with the clear intention to mislead, to deceive.

It is at least fair to say that in attempts to finesse their identities to authorities at Walter Reed, the human targets of their inquiry, those with the most to lose, Hull and Priest went as far from wearing a press badge as it is possible to get, short of posing as a patient or hospital staffer. Those points at the far end of the ethical continuum generally bear the label “undercover.” Was their approach perfectly legitimate, even unavoidable, given the circumstances and the stakes? Especially in light of the results, most, I think, would argue yes. I certainly would. Did the use of these tactics undermine the value of the enterprise or call it into question? They did not.

So why avoid the obvious term of art? Why distance the enterprise from the label, as if bringing attention to the undercover aspects of their efforts would sully the achievement? Sadly and unfairly, I believe, it is because the label “undercover” would have sullied the achievement, at least in the eyes of some important players. This is largely because of a movement against undercover reporting in some quarters since the late 1970s, a movement the Post—once a daring, open, and exemplary proponent of the practice helped to instigate.

What also emerges from the record is that over and over again, going undercover has proved to be an indispensable tool in the high-value, high-impact journalism of changing systems and righting wrongs. It has provided an enduring, magnetic, if sometimes tricky, narrative form that never ceases to fascinate, even when the execution fails to scale the high journalistic or literary walls. Colossal lapses and misfires aside—the book addresses these, too, and they happen relatively rarely—undercover reporting has also been at the forefront of important published and broadcast efforts to create awareness, to correct widespread misconceptions, to provoke outrage, and to give a human face—whether that face inspires horror or compassion or a little of both—to any number of institutions and social worlds that otherwise would be ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented for lack of open access.

Even the most cursory review of the reporting that has proudly worn the undercover banner bears witness to this fact. In addition to its public service, the very best work in this genre also has aggrandized journalistic legends at the institutional level, lionized great editors, who are so essential to the guiding and crafting of these projects, and catapulted individual reporters to enviable careers. Prizes for projects that involved undercover tactics are plentiful and not just in the distant past. Like almost no other reportorial approach, setting out deliberately to fool some of the people at least some of the time has repeatedly produced important, compelling, and—this might be the key to the method’s enduring popularity—often riveting results.

Most important, surreptitiousness in reporting is also often on the side of the angels. At its best, it speaks directly to eight if not all ten essential journalistic tenets pinpointed by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their book The Elements of Journalism: the pursuit of truth, loyalty to citizens, the obligation to verify, the independent monitoring of power, providing a forum for public outcry, maintaining independence from those journalists report about, the opportunity to exercise personal conscience, and—perhaps most pertinently—the ability to make the significant interesting and relevant.

Going undercover is meant to be the journalism of last resort, and it has remained so even in the aftermath of waves of collegial opposition since the late 1970s, despite the many and repeated assertions to the contrary. None of the moves to banish or degrade the practice has had even the slightest effect on the slow, always selective but steady rate of production or publication since then.

Undercover enterprises have started as books that also became newspaper or magazine serials. They have started as newspaper or magazine series that later developed into books of a very different sort, sometimes books of policy or advocacy that barely refer to the more sensationalized original project. Some have been collaborations between newspapers and television programs, and some represent collaborations between publications or television programs and law enforcement agencies, better government groups, or other advocacy groups on all points along the political spectrum. Some start in one format and stay in that format. Since at least the early 1960s, as technology began to allow, scores of television series and segments have relied on the hidden camera, which, combined with reporter-producer moxie, has created its own undercover subspecies. Print reporters also have used miniature cameras as far back as the late 1940s.

More recently, publications that originate online have begun to add a new shelf to this bulging closet. As a medium, the Web is an especially promising format for undercover journalism, especially in its ability to meld audio and video documentation to word stories and add still photographs and a written-word account to those recorded video and audio segments. As important, the Web also brings the ability to add backup citations and more in-depth documentation via links and hypertext, digital repositories, and even topics pages.

What unites the projects that have been reviewed is the need they created for the reporters or their surrogates to engage in a deceptive ruse or some sort of identity acrobatics great or small to do the work. They have posed as; lived as or among; worked as; interned as; volunteered as; signed on or trained as; become paying customers or patients or clients of; blended in as if; functioned as; fellow-traveled as; become; endured; petitioned; cold-called; avoided correcting the mistaken impression of; projected the false impression of or given off the impression of being; gained access with incomplete or misleading information to; presented as; gathered information unannounced; finessed an application form to; took advantage of employer ignorance; contrived to; got confidential permission to; cross-dressed as; turned personal experience into; shadowed without telling everyone involved; infiltrated; snuck into; slipped in or encountered by chance; used privileged access to; entered for the purpose of testing; staked out or stalked unseen; secretly filmed or recorded; exercised—or caused someone else to exercise—his or her rights as ordinary citizens, visitors, or customers without revealing the actual intent; or encountered something firsthand by chance or through unconnected personal experience and then revealed it in publication as if that had been the intention all along.

Undercover reporting has continued, ethical conundrums and all, in a steady and uninterrupted flow since at least the 1840s. That’s when reporters for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune posed as auction buyers in Virginia and Louisiana to report on the evils of slavery. In another case, a reporter signed on with a Civil War infantry regiment of the Petersburg Grays to get up close and personal at the hanging of the abolitionist John Brown.

For more than 160 years since, examples of important work involving undercover reporting have numbered in the thousands. That’s a lot, considering the time, editorial deliberations, effort, ethical consternation, expense, exertion and risk these undertakings so often demand.

But it says a lot about a story with an expected shelf life of a day, a week, or a month when it ascends into legend, when almost anyone can summon it routinely to make a point in casual conversation, even more than a hundred years after the tom-toms first beat news of it across the time zones. Nellie Bly’s incarceration in a madhouse for The New York World was such a story and the best known in what would become a very long line of exposés of public and private health care institutions. John Howard Griffin’s skin-dyed transformation from white journalist into black man in segregated 1959 for a long-defunct magazine called Sepia was another. As a book, still in print, Black Like Me has sold more than 10 million copies. It also has spawned a not-always-flattering body of literary criticism, a classic Eddie Murphy parody, and any number of imitators, one as recently as 1994 for The Washington Post, dyed black skin and all.

Then there is Pamela Zekman’s Mirage Tavern ruse of 1978 for the Chicago Sun-Times, which purchased a bar to investigate widespread corruption perpetrated by Chicago officials. The hidden cameras caught city inspectors accepting payoffs for ignoring safety violations and the ensuing 25-part series documented many instances of state and local officials attempting to extort money from the tavern. Afterward, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee successfully led the attack to deny it a Pulitzer because the newspaper had relied on deception to get the story. One wonders what he might have said about Priest and Hull’s Walter Reade expose four decades later.

The criticism that has bedeviled the practice in more recent years comes from the ethical compromises it inevitably requires, its reliance on some of journalism’s most questionable means, and the unacceptable excesses of the very few. It is journalism without the virtuous fig leaf. Deception not only happens in the course of reporting undercover; it is also intrinsic to the form. For would-be truth-tellers, this is shaky ground.

Yet at its best, undercover reporting achieves most of the things great journalism means to achieve. At its worst, but no worse than bad journalism in any form, it is not only an embarrassment but can also be downright destructive. Still, its capacity to bring important social issues to public attention and thus to motivate reformers to act far outweighs the objections against it, legitimate though they may be. Its benefits, when used selectively, far outweigh the lapses, which, it turns out, are more of a preoccupation in only some quarters of the profession than they are with the public.

(By Brooke Kroeger. Excerpted with permission from Journal of Magazine & New Media Research, Vol. 13, No 1., Spring 2012)