UNCOVERING TRUTHS RARELY REQUIRES GOING UNDERCOVER

Planning a sting but short of decoys, police recently asked a Star-News
reporter whether she would portray a prostitute. To catch men who pay money
for sex, a form of commerce which as you may know is against the law, the
cops needed bait.

Admittedly, an undercover police assignment is a tempting offer. This is
especially true if, like reporter Amy Turnbull, you're a journalist whose
beat is the justice system.

Working the sting no doubt would have yielded a fascinating first-person
account of how police wage their unending war on tawdry vice.

For Amy - or any other Star-News reporter - the answer had to be no.

The Star-News needs to stay out of the law enforcement business. Not
everyone understands the reasons for this. After all, if a newspaper is
against crime why shouldn't it lock arms with police to rid the streets of
scofflaws?

The problem is that newspapers can't put on a badge without sacrificing
neutrality.

The public pays the police to enforce laws, and readers pay the newspaper
to report the news.

Those clear lines would blur if the newspaper sometimes also enforced the
law. Could the newspaper be trusted to report fairly on what the police do
if the paper is part of the police's operation?

The same concern would surface on the next step up the criminal justice
ladder, when matters go to court. As part of the prosecution, the newspaper
would hardly be without a dog in the hunt.

The paper owes its allegiance to the truth and to its readers. Enforcing
laws, the obligation would switch to clearing cases and making prosecutions
stand up. In that environment, to help a case, a reporter or editor might
need to withhold facts, instead of printing the news - as the paper is
supposed to do for its readers. Not to mention that defendants would become
the paper's adversaries, rather than strictly figures in the news. A
corresponding loss of journalistic interest in the other side of the story
is bound to result.

Worse, the paper would ruin its ability to function as a watchdog of
official conduct. One of the reasons to have a First Amendment is to make
sure the press can serve as a check and balance on government power. If the
paper and the government are on the same team, checks and balances fly out
the window.

Loss of neutrality isn't the only concern. Many sources of information -
crucial to the paper's watchdog role - would dry up in a hurry if people
worried that talking to a reporter might be the same as talking to a cop.

For all sorts of reasons, some people don't prefer to confide in police.
Yet occasionally they have something to say that the rest of us should
hear. Doubts about confidentiality surely would keep more than a few from
coming forward. Since the newspaper should be the eyes and ears of its
readers, the last thing it ought to do is shut off channels of communication.

In whatever way you look at it, more harm than good is done when a paper's
independence is compromised.

Besides, no matter whom it's done for, I'm opposed to nearly all undercover
work by journalists.

It's fine for police to deceive. They couldn't catch nearly as many
criminals otherwise. It's never good for a newspaper to be party to
deception, which is what undercover assignments are all about.

Once a newspaper proves it's willing to deceive to get a story, it creates
a reason to wonder whether it will lie in telling the story. If ends
justify means, then there's nothing to stop a paper from tricking whomever
it deems necessary - including its readers.

When there is no other way humanly possible to find something out and only
when the information sought is of substantial public concern, a limited
case for an undercover journalism job can be made. Such occasions are rare.

It all works better when the paper keeps things simple: remain independent,
the readers are the boss, tell the truth.