Blog4 — 7 days of Frank Smith doing undercover reporting at a mental hospital by Baidi Wang

Since I just did a presentation about undercover reporting, I want to talk about another case of undercover reporting. This case leaves me a deep impression because of its cruelty. I can feel how hard to live there when I just read the description of this case. The case is about undercover reporting a mental hospital by a reporter called Frank Smith. He spent a week in the Kankakee State Hospital for the insane and he described it as seven days of Hell. That illustrates what he experienced there. From his case, there’re two ethical issues coming to my mind, the first one is how to cover the truth without his own emotion. Another ethical issue is to make sure reporters could let themselves be immersed in their roles of undercover reporting even though the process is painful and tough.

First, I want to say how big challenge Smith faced when he covered this story. Kankakee State Hospital was like a Hell. Not only the horrible living conditions there, but also the violence indeed existed there as well. He recalled he was sent to cure his “violent tendencies” that he spent 15 hours strapped down in a dirty river water. At the same time, he also mentioned another thing about fire-trap halls that lead 17 patients to pass by at last in 1885. I can feel how shocked and depressed when he was in that hospital for a week, but even like living in such an extreme environment, Smith still had to write anything about the truth. He cannot write something not real or something is much worse than the truth. Smith had his personal opinion in his undercover reporting, but fortunately he didn’t write anything against journalism ethic of keeping objective all the time. Just tell the truth without bias even though we may cover some bad or negative stories. “The reporters’ further purpose was to experience the conditions, the cruelty, and the difficulties in as much the way their subjects experienced them as possible, and to fill in what was by then an already tried-and-true narrative framework with details amassed from actual experiences. (p. 62)”. (Kroeger, 2013, P62). I cannot agree more about this quote from the article “The Truth About Deception”, it highly conclude how journalists should keep an objective mind during undercover reporting. If I meet with the same question, I will do the same thing. I may write down all my personal bias of the truth in my journal, but not in my final reporting for sure.

Second, In Smith’s reporting, the first thing he mentioned is dirty. It was really hard for him to live there, he had to face lots of challenges making the covering more difficult, but he had to find a way to keep himself awake to note, to remember and to think about what he saw, what he heard and what he experienced. Smith was a journalist with a high sense of responsibility that he had a strong will to recognize he is not only a journalist but also a patient, so he chose to tolerate everything ridiculous happened in the hospital. I get a good quote from the article “The Brief Against Deception in Reporting”: “I concluded then that a common thread ran through many of the stories where reporters posed or failed to disclose their identities. They wished to take the law into their own hands, to displace law enforcement officials, whom they viewed as inadequate.” (Goldstein, 2012, P3). Smith did a good job in this case since he really treated himself as a real patient to get in touch with the real life there. If I meet with the same situation, I don’t know whether I can continue to pretend to be a patient as Smith did for a long time, but I’ll try my best to do my work there for the longest time that I can tolerate.

In summary, I have to say I really respect journalists who did undercover reporting a lot. All of them are warriors and fighters aiming to tell truth and facts of some secret stories. Undercover journalism is really a way to show how a journalist’s ethical awareness and professional quality. We have to thank to those excellent journalists who being the truthful information from the front line, it’s their high ethical civilization that leads us to see a real world.

 

Reference

  1. Brooke, K. (2013). Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception. International Journal Of Communication (19328036), 72178-2181.
  2. Goldstein, T. (2012). The Brief Against Deception in Reporting. Journal Of Magazine & New Media Research, 13(1), 1-3.

 

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