Truth, Lies, and Videotape

They're like Hugh Hefner's rabbits: by turns fluffy, then aggressive, then sexy, but always profitable -- and multiplying. In 1969 there was one television newsmagazine -- 60 Minutes. By 1989, 20/20 and 48 Hours had joined the nest. Though some succumbed to the cruelties of nature, today there are seven, with more on the way. By fall, ABC will have three, CBS three, and NBC two. Even Fox is getting in on the act, introducing Front Page, with correspondent Ron Reagan, the ex-president's son.

As the genre grows, each show seeks a distinguishing trait. For ABC's PrimeTime Live, the effort has proven wildly successful. Now finishing its fourth season, it is one of television's top-ranked shows, and likely to be with us to a ripe old age.

But is wasn't always that healthy. Despite voluminous hype, PrimeTime Live was practically born PrimeTime Dead. "It was supposed to be the second coming of broadcast news," recalls Eric Mink, TV critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Instead, it was a laughingstock."

On August 3, 1989, PrimeTime Live debuted, emphasizing the "live" aspect: "Why did Thomas Root wind up on the ocean with a bullet wound? His first television interview, live. The American hostages in Lebanon: Can they be rescued? How do you punish their captors? Secretary of State Baker joins us live as military experts develop a plan." Plus: "Can men and women be just friends?. . . . An electronic prison, worn on the body, monitored by computer, for one of the world's richest men. And Roseanne Barr, who says she's been dissected and critiqued, and she's ready to sound off. . . . Roseanne joins us live tonight."

The show tried to do too much. The anchors, Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson, wandered the studio, shoving mikes in the face of a live studio audience, facing the camera or each other, often sounding geeky, a bitlike George Bush. Here's Donaldson on that first show: "Diane, going live without a script, you know, is exciting, but it's also a little scary. It's a little bit like Evel Knievel getting on his motorbike, trying to jump the Grand Canyon. If he makes it, it's terrific. If he doesn't make it, it's a long way down." Sawyer: "No parachutes here, no parachutes."

No one felt more like bailing out than Sawyer when a live remote from a playground on a later show revealed . . . a playground, with nobody there. An interview with a Chinese student dissident fell apart on-air, under the weight of technical difficulties and language barriers. Saturday Night Live found the show an easy target.

More trouble: Diane and Sam just didn't seem to get along. Then again, everybody and Sam didn't seemto get along. And that live studio audience -- well, this wasn't quite David Letterman.

Instead of canceling, ABC started shifting. The "live" aspect faded out. By 1990, Diane and Sam were separated, she to stay in New York, he back to his Washington turf. But it wasn't star management that did the trick.

Instead, PrimeTime concentrated on investigations, partly by exploiting a device most of its subjects can't see and wouldn't like if they could: a hidden camera. Under the direction of investigative whiz and senior producer Ira Rosen, a 60 Minutes veteran, and prolific hidden-camera producers like Robbie Gordon, the show has gone seriously undercover.

We've watched from the inside of a refrigerator as dishonest repairmen did nothing for a lot of money, witnessed televangelists faking miracle cures, watched day-care workers slap their charges and crooked doctors line up to buy and sell fraudulent workers' compensation claimants.

Although PrimeTime is hardly the first television show to employ the technology, it airs more secret-camera episodes than any other TV newsmagazine. "They seem to want to use a hidden camera every week," says Esther Kartiganer, a senior editor who vets shows for 60 Minutes and likes to keep an eye on the competition. Actually, over the past twelve months there have been eight such pieces, but each packs such a wallop that they stick in the viewer's mind. And the impact of PrimeTime's hidden-camera work is likely to spur its competitors further into the act.

Television newsmagazines have an insatiable hunger for the kind of documentation that looks good on screen. Palatial homes, incriminating memos, revealing audiotape -- these have always been the truffles of the producer on the hunt. But secretly recorded video, where the viewers see the action with their own eyes, may be the tastiest delicacy of all. (It is an expensive delicacy, however; PrimeTime often spends twice as much on such stories as on regular pieces, because of extra labor and research.)

The raw power of such clandestine filming was well demonstrated in PrimeTime's November 1992 segment on racism, called "True Colors." The show sent out two investigators, one white and one black, and watched how they were treated. From the employment agency that was courteous to the white but lectured the black, to the employees at a drycleaner who told the black that all jobs in the shop were filled, then moments later said the opposite to the white, to the auto salesman who quoted the black a higher price and stiffer terms than the white on the identical car -- the show was a powerful evocation of the stalled civil rights march. By the time Diane Sawyer walked in and confronted the bigots, all they could do was sputter.

In the tradition of the Chicago Sun-Times, with its famed Mirage Bar sting of corrupt city inspectors (see "The Mirage Takes Shape," CJR, September/October 1979), PrimeTime set up a phony medical clinic in Los Angeles and filmed middlemen offering to supply doctors with patients whose ailments were bogus. The suppliers would get kickbacks; the doctors would collect on improper insurance claims. As the show made evident, rampant operations like this contribute to to excessively high health care and insurance costs. The hard-hitting segment prompted California authorities to crack down.

PrimeTime has pointed a hidden camera into the London hotel room of Malawi's president, documenting the shopping binge of the leader of one of the world's poorest countries. It has shown Wichita students selling guns, Peruvians defrauding adoption-minded Americans by selling them unexportable babies, doctors who repeatedly misread mammograms, and a quadriplegic patient crying out amid filthy conditions at a veterans hospital, "Don't leave me, please! They're trying to kill me out there!" This April the show followed members of Congress to a lobbyist-funded vacation in Florida.

While PrimeTime's reliance on this sexy but intrusive technology has not become a matter of public discussion, several aspects of hidden-camera journalism have triggered serious debate within ABC's walls. "There's a certain general unease at ABC News on what constitutes misrepresenting who you are," says a news division veteran. All hidden-camera shoots for the show must be pre-approved by the network's new division, which in turn gets an okay from ABC's legal department (state laws vary greatly in their tolerance of the practice; Texas, for example, is relatively easy, while Illinois is tough). ABC is rewriting its guidelines on the technique, incorporating lessons learned in recent years. Meanwhile, they rely on the guidelines developed by the Society of Professional Journalists (see box, page 28).

Perhaps no story better illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the medium than PrimeTime's story on the Food Lion supermarket chain. On November 5, 1992, millions of Americans watched through the lens of a well-camouflaged camera as store employees took old meat and chicken, then relabeled and sold it as fresh. Former employees from several stores talked of managers retrieving food from dumpsters and dipping putrid ham in bleach instead of discarding it -- all to reach departmental profit levels.

The program, shades of Upton Sinclair's 1906 The Jungle, shocked an enormous audience and jolted an industry. Food Lion's stock dropped about 15 percent the next day. The company, which calls itself America's fastest-growing supermarket chain, with almost 1,000 stores throughout the South, is still struggling to turn around poor employee morale and worse public perceptions.

The Food Lion story began with a tip from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (Food Lions is nonunion) and documentation by the Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP regularly supplies reporters with massive research from its staff, which includes attorneys and law student volunteers). PrimeTime followed up with some seventy interviews of Food Lion employees.

Scrambling for visuals, the show sent in a field producer, Lynne Nuefer Litt, to get the goods. Litt secured a job in the meat departments of two Food Lions in North Carolina and stayed two weeks -- all it took to get the disturbing evidence.

The piece came out punching, with an interview with a woman from a Food Lion meat department: "I've seen my supervisor take chicken out of the bone can, make us wash it, and put it back out. And it was rotten."

Food Lion didn't exactly whimper. It launched a massive and aggressive p.r. effort, charging that PrimeTime had distorted the truth, exaggerated, and used manipulative, selective footage to back a pre-established point of view.

The company also filed a lawsuit, an odd one. Food Lion is asking the court to rule that undercover investigative reporting be actionable under the RICO (Racketeer-Influenced Corupt Organization) statute. The case is pending, and the implications for the news industry, if any, are unclear.

Litt, the PrimeTime producer/Food Lion meat wrapper, was certainly undercover. She rigged references and wrote on her application: "I really miss working in a grocery store, and I love meat wrapping. . . . I would like to make a career with the company." She told a co-worker, Linda Anglin, who is about the same age and warmed quickly to her, that she had been recently divorced after ten years of marriage, which was true, and had moved down to North Carolina for a change, which wasn't. She explained her abrupt departure by saying a grandfather had just died.

Television is not alone with the subterfuge issue -- print reporters have been known to go undercover and to debate the ethical considerations (see "To Sting or Not To Sting," CJR, May/June 1991). Besides, as Janet Malcolm pointed out in her famous New Yorker essay, even plain old interview journalism can involve betrayal (see "Dangerous Liaisons," CJR, July/August 1989). But hidden-camera journalism is unique in that its very nature requires lies or, at least, a lack of candor -- and that seems to make some print ethicists crazy. One was the syndicated Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy, who once studied to be a Trappist monk. After sardonically calling the Food Lion segment "really bold journalism," he added: "It's possible to uncover the truth by being untruthful, but where do television newspeople secure the right to legitimize their deceits? How about some truth-in-packaging as the program begins: 'We lied to get this story.'"

One the other hand, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt contends that "People committing malfeasance don't have any right to privacy. . . . What are we saying -- that Upton Sinclair shouldn't have smuggled his pencil in?"

However, Sinclair did not have to deal with television's thirst for pictures and its insistence on brevity, which sometimes means that context gets left on the cutting room floor. In one Food Lion sequence, Anglin is heard saying that she doesn't know how to clean the meat saw; the implication is that no one is bothering to maintain the equipment. But according to Anglin, PrimeTime didn't show the other part -- in which she explains that she doesn't even do cleaning -- it's not in her job description. In fact, Anglin says, it was Litt's job, and Litt had asked Anglin to stay late and help her. "She was fully aware that I didn't do that," Anglin says. "So she set me up on that one." On the other hand, Litt apparently hadn't been trained either, and never observed anyone cleaning the saw. PrimeTime seems to have made a fair point in an unfair manner.

This raises another question: Are the on-camera Food Lion workers victims or perpetrators? On the show, Sawyer declares that most of the Food Lion employees shown are hard workers, that PrimeTime meant no harm to them. "If so, they shouldn't even have showed our faces," says Anglin.

Sometimes the hidden pictures failed to prove anything. At one point the narrator described workers relabeling old chicken, as PrimeTime's reporting indeed indicated; but on close inspection, viewers would note that the supporting before-and-after shots were of different parts of a bird.

Yet in the final analysis, PrimeTime's evidence appears sound, especially as it is supported by the Government Accountability Project's volumes of affidavits from Food Lion workers. Hence, the show did its job -- successfully illustrating a serious problem.

Or at least a piece of it. It is hard not to wonder whether the tight focus of the hidden camera leads journalists further into a typical trap -- zeroing in on a villain when the problem is systemic. PrimeTime clearly explained that Food Lion's harsh labor policies encouraged employees to cut corners. But while PrimeTime was focusing on Food Lion, Atlanta's WAGA-TV was in the midst of a six-week hidden-camera investigation that documented alleged violations in every one of the twenty metro Atlanta supermarkets it surveyed. Many were offering for sale meats more than two weeks after the original expiration date. The station found trouble at Bruno's, Ingles Markets, A&P, Big Star, Kroger, and Winn-Dixie.

Viewers of hidden-camera journalism serve as their own eyewitnesses. "Seeing is believing," says NBC field producer Bob Windrem, who spent a dozen years each in TV and print. "That's why television has higher credibility with the public than print."

Not that aiming a hidden camera at someone is inherently worthwhile. For example, take this fairly recent PrimeTime promo: "Coming up: Is fraud in the cards? Behind the scenes of a tele-psychic scam, when PrimeTime continues." Given that standard, one might imagine another piece -- with PrimeTime itself as a target: "Coming up: A dressing down at PrimeTime Live!" The subject: tensions between Sam and Diane, Diane and executive producer Rick Kaplan, and Kaplan and ABC News president Roone Arledge, widely reported in the press. Might we one day see Hard Copy airing secret footage of Arledge arguing with Kaplan in a mid-show call, as he did on April 29 while PrimeTime rolled a hard-hitting piece about congressman frolicking on Captiva Island, courtesy of electronics industry lobbyists? Donaldson himself had received speaking fees from the same lobbyists and, according to The Washington Post, Arledge, over Kaplan's objection, angrily demanded a fuller on-air disclosure.

Clearly, a thin line separates substantive footage from voyeurism. Watching someone do virtually anything without their knowing can be titillating. Daydreaming on the job, licking an envelope while looking around nervously -- innocent acts can seem dubious, even nefarious. Practitioners know this. "It's no secret to anyone that this hidden-camera stuff intrigues the viewers," says Kelly Ogle, investigative reporter at KWTV, a CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City. "They like to see people doing things when they don't know they're being watched."

Some veteran producers argue that hidden-camera journalism can be a sort of souped-up event, a contrivance that with too frequent use will make their craft look cheesy. Don Hewitt, for one, uses it only occasionally. "Taste and integrity and ethics -- a lot of things go into this," he says. 60 Minutes employed a hidden camera in preparing its much-acclaimed piece on how the U.S. government encourages U.S. firms to export jobs to Latin America. But, says Hewitt, "I cut out all the hidden-camera stuff -- it would have looked like we were doing it for the sake of doing it."

However, the tabloid TV shows, less tortured over philosophical issues and desperate to supply five days a week of shockers, have taken eagerly to the practice. Local stations, too, are shooting away with this equipment, sometimes swatting flies with sledgehammers. KWTV bought a minicamera early this year and immediately used it to show minors buying beer at a hockey game. New York's WNBC smuggled one into a coffee shop meeting of an alleged pedophile group, the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

While a hidden camera in the locker room, the boiler room, or the conference room can be a powerful journalistic implement -- witness PrimeTime's exposes on everything from crooked mechanics to racism -- it can cheapen the craft when misused. Abuse could also lead to calls forregulation.

What PrimeTime Live is wrestling with, and what an increased number of TV journalists are likely to confront, are questions that boil down to this: Where is the threshold? When does investigating become spying? And is spying always wrong?

DECEPTION CHECKLIST

According to the Society of Professional Journalists, hidden cameras and other forms of misrepresentation should only be used

checkmark When the information obtained is of profound importance. It must be of vital public interest, such as revealing great "system failure" at the top levels, or it must prevent profound harm to individuals.

checkmark When all other alternatives for obtaining the same information have been exhausted.

checkmark When the journalists involved are willing to disclose the nature of the deception and the reason for it.

checkmark When the individuals involved and their news organization apply excellence, through outstanding craftsmanship as well as the commitment of time and funding needed to pursue the story fully.

checkmark When the harm prevented by the information revealed through deception outweighs any harm caused by the act of deception.

checkmark When the journalists involved have conducted a meaningful, collaborative, and deliberative decisionmaking process.

The guidelines go on to discuss reporter safety and the uncomfortable reality of hypocrisy, concluding with criteria that do not justify deception:

checkmark Winning a prize

checkmark Beating the competition.

checkmark Getting the story with less expense of time and resources.

checkmark Doing it because "the others already did it."

checkmark The subjects of the story are themselves unethical.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe