Sting Journalism

BBC Radio World Service carried a story this morning on a burgeoning niche in media called Sting Journalism, in which reporters go undercover to dig out and expose corruption in government. In some cases, amateur accomplices who are not professional journalists are recruited to aid in the process of discovering what the government is up to. The amateur accomplices occasionally employ their own brand of corrupt practices to get the story.

Here is a column by Vir Sanghvi on the ethics of sting journalism.