BY MARCEL DUFRESNE
Marcel Dufresne is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

By most standards of investigative reporting, Newsday's plan to document racial discrimination in Long Island's real estate industry had to rank among the most ambitious, elaborate, and expensive undercover operations ever contemplated by a newspaper. Newsday's staff devised the undercover plan in 1989 during early reporting for a groundbreaking series about segregation. If the scheme worked, it would expose an ugly and illegal discriminatory practice. But it also raised questions about deception, among other things.

The idea itself was hardly new: send out trained "testers" -- black couples and white couples posing as home buyers -- to see if real estate agents steer them, respectively, to predominantly black or white neighborhoods. Several newspapers and TV stations had done such testing for stories about segregation, but never on the scale envisaged by the mid-level editors who planned it at Newsday. The plan was a researcher's dream: a massive, scientifically designed experiment that would statistically measure the prevalence of racial steering in Long Island's huge real estate industry. But the plan also had the makings of a logistical nightmare. One scenario would have required up to forty trained testers -- some reporters, the rest actors from New York City -- each with a cover story, including an employment history and references. The testers would visit 200 randomly selected real estate offices and record how they were treated. Backing them up would be a separate office, with a bank of phones and a full-time staff to verify each tester's cover. To be effective, the operation would have to be kept secret even from most of the newspaper's staff. Racial steering is illegal under state and federal law, but New York officials and many blacks contend that the practice is widespread and has intensified segregation on Long Island. Housing reporters Michael Alexander and Robert Fresco could find little proof of this, however, other than a few personal accounts of black who said they had been steered and a handful of prosecutions by state and county officials. "A steering test would have been the smoking gun," says Alexander.

But as the proposal inched up through Newsday's hierarchy during the winter and spring of 1989, it encountered formidable objections, including concerns that it smelled like a sting, that it couldn't be kept secret, that it was just too complicated to pull off. The discussion unfolded this way. DECEMBER, 1988: Team leader Adrian Peracchio first suggests that reporters conduct limited testing to collect details and color for their stories about steering. Project editor Joyce Brown is skeptical. Newsday generally opposes undercover operations, and she is not about to propose undercover testing just to make stories lively. But she wants hard figures, and the idea intrigues her. The team's education reporters, for example, are compiling a huge database from which to analyze spending levels, test scores, and other statistical measures to explain inequities in educational quality between schools in white and black neighborhoods. Brown thinks testing might provide comparable evidence for the housing stories.

Later in the winter, Brown dispatches Peracchio and Alexander to learn the who, why, and how of testing. The reporters know that housing advocates and law-enforcement agencies use testing to collect evidence against agents suspected of steering. As for the media, a computer search turns up several cases of undercover testing by newspapers, including The Miami Herald, the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, and Newsday itself, and by a few television stations that had used hidden cameras. All had found illegal steering, but in even the most ambitious stories, testers visited fewer than a dozen sales offices. Typically, the local real estate industry denied that steering was common and blamed violations on a few unscrupulous agents.

There are several thousand real estate offices on Long Island, a strip of land roughly twenty miles wide that begins east of Manhattan and stretches 100 miles into the Atlantic. Most homes are owner-occupied and range from modest lower-middle class tract houses to palatial oceanfront estates. Brown knows that measuring steering in such a diverse market would challenge even Newsday's resources. But as the team delves deeper she becomes convinced that there is a way, and her boss, Long Island editor Charlotte H. Hall, agrees. Gingerly, they approach managing editor Howard Schnieder, a Newsday veteran who thinks most undercover reporting is "unsophisticated and unnecessary." "I start with the premise that we don't do undercover reporting unless there is no other way to get the story," says Schneider, whose first reaction to the proposal was, in his words, "cranky and negative." Couldn't the series document steering by interviewing brokers, former agents, and black homeowners who claim they have been steered? Yes, Hall and Brown reply, but the material would be almost entirely anecdotal. If Newsday wants to assess the prevalence of steering across Long Island, among people of all incomes, then massive testing is the only way. After numerous meetings and memos, Schneider agrees. The editors also agree that if they do not find evidence of widespread steering, that too will be a story. SPRING 1989: Research for the proposal moves forward, even after Brown goes on maternity leave in March. Peracchio finds Kale Williams, director of a fair housing agency in Chicago and one of the country's foremost testing experts. They exchange letters and finally Williams flies in from Chicago to help present the case for testing, which he calls "a valid technique recognized not only by social scientists but by the courts." He tells the editors that steering can be blatant or subtle. In some real estate offices, for example, both white and black testers may be treated courteously but shown houses in very different areas. Perhaps an agent might deny to a black family that houses are available in a certain area, or the agent might use "vigorous salesmanship" on white buyers while "they just go through the motions" for blacks. Williams assures Newsday that it is possible to design a large-scale test that would show the extent of steering on Long Island with 95 percent accuracy. They settle on a working proposal with 200 matched tests, using ten white couples and ten black couples. On that scale, Williams is confident that both secrecy and statistical reliability can be achieved.

Williams, who has worked with reporters in Chicago on smaller steering tests, sees Newsday's project as in a class apart. If it found widespread steering, that would challenge the belief that in modern America a black family with means can buy a house anywhere.

Schneider is impressed with Williams's "very intelligent presentation," but he is adamant that though Williams might be hired as a consultant. Newsday should run its own operation. By now the three editors -- Brown, Hall, and Schneider -- are convinced that large-scale testing is both workable and important enough to the series to propose relaxing the policy on undercover reporting. The question is, can they convince Newsday editor Anthony Marro? In May, after months spent refining it, a detailed plan is sent to him.

That same month, one state away, The Hartford Courant runs a front-page story describing discrimination it found when reporters tested fifteen real estate agencies in and around Hartford (see Laurel, CJR, November/December 1989). Two weeks later, the Courant's reader representative, Henry McNulty, writes a column saying the paper shouldn't have gone undercover, even if it was the only way to get the story. By misrepresenting themselves, he writes, the reporters lied. SUMMER, 1989: By all indications Marro is considering the proposal seriously. In meetings and memos he asks increasingly tough questions, sending the editors scrambling for answers.

Interestingly, the cost -- estimated as high as $ 50,000 -- does not seem to be a factor. Instead, Marro's concerns fall into four categories: logistics, deception, secrecy, and what he calls "threshold." While covering the Justice Department for Newsday and The New York Times, Marro had seen that agency's questionable use of undercover stings. Though he doesn't see the steering test as a sting exactly, he has reservations about the lack of probable cause. The proposal calls for picking agents at random -- the foundation of statistical analysis -- and that troubles Marro.

"The question is, should there be a threshold of presumed bad conduct before a newspaper unleashes this sort of thing on unsuspecting people?" Marro says. There are times, he says, "when it is perfectly justified for newspapers to do a certain amount of undercover work, but I think there has to be a threshold and I'm not sure we had it here with the individual realtors." Brown and Hall counter that housing patterns on Long Island are clear evidence of some level of steering.

But Marro has other concerns: reporters "are not necessarily equipped by training or talent" to work undercover. If actors are used, how will their behavior be monitored for consistency? Nuances of speech and body language could affect how agents treat "buyers." And since actors aren't trained reporters, how could Newsday trust their accounts in writing stories? Someone suggests having the actors wear body microphones, but Marro is skeptical: "Does the process of trying to control it get us involved in some things we really don't want to do?"

Finally, Marro worries that an operation of this size can't be kept secret. One leak, he says, and "every fax machine on Long Island" would start humming.

Just before Labor Day 1989, nearly ten months after testing was first suggested, Marro says no.

In the end, he says, technical obstacles weigh more heavily than any reluctance to go undercover. Marro worries that 200 undercover visits would produce only broad generalizations about the prevalence of steering, not the definitive numbers that Newsday was counting on. Even that large a sample, he contends, would not allow the paper to compare steering in different parts of the island and among people of different incomes. "I saw many downsides," he says. "If anything went bad, that could possibly compromise and complicate a worthwhile series." SEPTEMBER, 1990: More than a year after the testing plan is abandoned, the series -- A WORLD APART: SEGREGATION ON LONG ISLAND -- runs over ten days. Exhaustively researched, it uses moving personal accounts and startling statistics to bring readers face to face with racial segregation. It portrays Long Island as among "the most segregated areas in America," a place where many of the 200,000 black residents are trapped in neighborhoods beset by drugs and crime, where the police are unresponsive, and where the schools are inferior.

On day none, two stories describing what one headline called the THE STING OF STEERING appear, based on interviews with the usual sources -- blacks who have been steered, brokers, agents, housing advocates, and state prosecutors. LOOKING BACK: In August of 1989, some staffers had been upset with the decision to kill the steering test. Mike Alexander, whose early work helped set the testing idea in motion, wondered openly in the newsroom whether one unstated reason the plan was dropped was that management feared losing real estate advertising. "I've learned in investigative reporting there's a good reason and a real reason," he says. But Robert Fresco, the other housing reporter, says he has "no solid reason" to suspect such a motive. For his part, Marro says, "If we were concerned about alienating the realtors on Long Island we wouldn't have started this [segregation] project."

Given that undercover reporting is frowned upon in some editorial circles, it's reasonable to wonder whether editors at Newsday thought the testing plan might jeopardize the segregation series's chances to win a major prize. (Newsday nominated the series for a Pulitzer Prize this year, in the public service category, but didn't win.) Undercover reporting came under attack in the early 1980s when the Chicago Sun-Times nearly won, but eventually lost, a Pulitzer Prize for stories about payoffs and corruption among city inspectors. The paper had opened the Mirage Bar and staffed it with reporters and photographers to collect evidence. Though the stories were impressive, some members of the Pulitzer advisory board felt that the ends didn't justify the paper's deceptive means. Every editor connected with Newsday's racial steering proposal, however, insisted that winning contests was never a consideration. "It never entered my mind. I never smelled any of that," says Hall, the Long Island editor. Today, the team's editors and reporters are proud of their series. Even Alexander, who seemed the most upset right after the decision to kill the steering test, says he wants "to dwell on the positive side of the series. I'm very proud of it."

Joyce Brown, who with Charlotte Hall had the most invested in the testing proposal, takes it as a triumph that the idea got as far as it did. "Did we need the test? The truth of the matter is no, we didn't." But, she adds, "always in the back of my mind it's just sitting there, something that could have been."

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