Undercover Journalism’s Last Call
Even now, I see no particular reason to disbelieve Greene’s columns but swallow what he said about them later. One’s no likelier to have been a pose than the other. Greene’s nonchalance put him squarely in a long tradition of Chicago journalism. There are no rewards for plodding sincerity in popular histories such as John McPhaul’s Deadlines and Monkeyshines and Ben Hecht’s Gaily, Gaily. As Hecht wrote of Charles MacArthur, each of them an inspiration for later generations of newspapering youth: his “antics” were “gay and macabre…he would defend a cause with his life, but he would speak of it mockingly, if at all.”
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Those were the days, right? Hecht’s one of the gods in the Chicago firmament, and his memoirs are full of stories too wonderful to believe. “Seeing himself as a storyteller,” MacAdams told us in Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend, “Hecht fictionalized everything he ever wrote about himself, including his own birth.” Such was the legacy Fuller encountered when he entered the newspaper business and eventually felt a great need to undo.
The strange thing about the Mirage series is that a charge of inauthenticity did it in. It was condemned as an antic, a sleight-of-hand unworthy of journalism’s highest honors. A historic project, it had a historic fall. I found the spot in News Values where Fuller talks about the Mirage–it’s in a chapter called “Deception and Other Confidence Games.” Fuller begins by recalling how he broke in as a police reporter, working with old-timers that Hecht and MacArthur “used as models for characters” in The Front Page. He wasn’t as wily as they were, “but I did become a passable liar in pursuit of the truth.”
This judgment reflected the uneasiness seeping into a business that, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, was taking itself especially seriously. “We would not allow reporters to misrepresent themselves in any way, and I don’t think we would be the hidden owners of anything,” Bradlee told me at the time. Patterson said, “Some felt the Mirage story could have been reported in another way,” and he compared the Sun-Times to an undercover policewoman enticing a john.
There were solid business as well as ethical reasons why undercover journalism passed out of newspapering fashion. With all due respect for Fuller’s notion of a “shortcut,” projects such as the Mirage were enormously expensive and time-consuming, and if they weren’t going to stock the trophy case they weren’t worth doing. Besides, TV’s hidden cameras could spy more spectacularly. And new legal perils arose. Targets of undercover probes discovered that if they sued their inquisitors for fraud (for lying, say, on the resumés that put investigators inside the plant) instead of libel, truth was no longer a defense.
Recktenwald might have been alone in this, but it never occurred to him that the Mirage deserved a Pulitzer. Ethics had nothing to do with it; the petty corruption the Mirage was uncovering just didn’t seem that important to him. “Nobody’s life hinged on this,” he says. As a BGA investigator he’d helped the Tribune win a couple of Pulitzers for undercover stories documenting vote fraud and corrupt ambulance services. “People were being abused,” he says. “People were dying. Lives were at stake.”
