Going undercover

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 1997 by Gaines, William C

Has the method seen its day at newspapers ?

Editor d note: I asked Bill Gained to share his thoughts on undercover reporting. Gained had just published the second edition of his textbook, Investigative Reporting for Print and Broadcast (Nelson-Hall Publishers, Chicago, $32.95).

- Steve Weinberg

My most exciting story? The one I'm working on now.

That's what a properly enthusiastic reporter should reply, but I find that difficult because in 1975 I had a unique career experience.

I had been a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune since 1963 and was assigned to the investigative team called the Task Force.

The Task Force was a standing group that reported on investigative subjects like patient care in nursing homes, deceitful sales practices, and government waste.

Rather than avoid the controversial method, we were expected to get undercover jobs to report from inside the target of the investigation. I had eleven undercover jobs within six years.

I had already been an undercover bill collector and sales trainee for a truck driving school when a janitor, who had quit his job at a small, for-profit hospital, told us that janitors were being used in surgery to move patients without washing up.

There was really no question about what had to be done. No newspaper reader would be expected to believe such a shocking account by an uneducated and disgruntled janitor.

Pam Zekman, who headed the team and now reports for CBS in Chicago, made the obvious decision that one of us should get a job in the hospital.

A routine method long ago

Undercover work was always approved and supervised by editors, who considered it a routine method of getting a story. The Tribune no longer does undercover reporting, having shunned it in the early 1980s as too deceitful.

But back then, I lied about my background and got a job at the hospital. After the Food Lion vs. ABC verdict, people tell me I would never get away with that today.

I'm not sure. I claimed no special expertise to get the job. Once hired, I only acted under direct orders from my supervisors. I worked hard to make sure that my janitorial skills would not be criticized.

I was in a position to see plenty. I saw that families of five were being brought into the hospital to have their tonsils removed, all the same day. The next day, another family would be in for mass tonsil surgery.

It may have been to my advantage that I had no medical experience. I was not certain it was wrong. I would report my observations to the others on the team and they would contact medical experts for their opinion.

Of course, it was mathematically impossible for an entire family to need their tonsils out the same day. The hospital was using a network of welfare clinics to recruit families for the unnecessary surgery and would bill Medicaid.

To squeeze out a few more dollars, the hospital was short staffed, so enlisted the janitors to keep the patients coming and going production style.

Soon I was joining with the other janitors and wheeling patients from the surgery table to their beds.

There was a room adjacent to surgery called the recovery room. We learned from medical experts that such a room is where patients are taken to have the vital signs monitored by a registered nurse to insure full recovery before they were returned to their beds.

The recovery room was always empty at the hospital, but when we got the state records of billing to Medicaid, they always contained a charge for the recovery room.

Getting to why

My undercover job had removed the middleman. Now I could tell the readers in a first-person account about what I saw. My experiences were a front-page sidebar to a main story about conditions at the hospital.

The undercover account became the frosting on the cake of a thoroughly investigated story involving interviews of patients, medical experts, and former employees. We searched every available public record. My report was only about my experiences, not from overheard conversations or stolen documents.

The results were immediate. The story ran on a Sunday and by Tuesday there were only three patients in the 100-bed hospital. The Chicago Board of Health set a hearing on license revocation, but the investigative story had closed it down for lack of patients.

I had shuttered a multi-million dollar private business and I knew that I had better be right. I was. Other employees of the hospital, including the head nurse, testified to the Board of Health and supported my account. The hospital never reopened. The story won a Pulitzer for the Tribune in 1976 but I always felt that I got the prize for being a good janitor rather than a journalist.

So I tried harder, and in 1988, shared a second Pulitzer with Ann Marie Lipinski and Dean Baquet for a story about conflicts of interests in the Chicago City Council. There was no undercover work in that story.

Best left to television

When it comes to undercover reporting, I believe I can take it or leave it. I joke that if called upon again, I would respond with my mop, but I believe that undercover reporting is best left to TV.