Session 9: UNDERCOVER JOURNALISM AND HIDDEN CAMERAS: THE NEW GADGETS AND THE NEW EDITORIAL CHALLENGES

• How are hidden cameras being used to expose corruption and human rights violations around the world
• What new regulatory and legal challenges may restrict hidden camera use
• What editorial guidelines are needed to curb unwarranted use of hidden cameras?

Session Chair:  Gillian Findlay, Correspondent, CBC, Canada

Featured Speakers: Simon Bucks, Managing Editor, Sky News;  Dorothy Byrne, Head of News & Current Affairs, Channel 4 News, UK; Mark Daly, Undercover Reporter, BBC, UK; Esther Enkin, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, CBC; Al Harraden, Engineer, Oztex., UK;  Donal MacIntyre, Investigative Reporter, UK;  Allan Maraynes, Sr. Investigative Producer, NBC Dateline, USA;  Bob Steele, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, USA; Adrian van Klaveren, Head of Newsgathering, BBC, UK

Produced by Edith Champagne, News Xchange

Gillian Findlay: My name is Gillian Findlay, I'm here to host the last session and thanks for lasting this long and for forsaking the beach. This is on undercover journalism and hidden cameras some of which you've just seen. So as a reward for forsaking the bar and the beach and sticking around for this we're going to start by showing you something we think is very exciting, it's video that you've never seen before and we're going to give you a warning, that some of you, we think five in particular, might find this deeply disturbing!

(Runs tape)

Ladies and gentlemen you have been caught in a News Xchange undercover sting; it's an interesting feeling isn't it and I want you to hang on to that for a second. The first thing I have to say is that Simon Bucks has made me promise that I will  apologise to all his friends on his behalf and he wants you to promise that all your secrets are safe with him. And the second thing we want to get to here is Al Harraden. He's the man responsible for taking those pictures obviously wearing hidden cameras. Al why don't you tell us how you did it?

Al Harraden: First of all I would like to thank my colleague Toby for some excellent undercover filming because anyone who has worn an undercover camera will appreciate how difficult it is. But as you saw on the previous clip we did use a classic button camera, very popular in the undercover field because the button is in the dead centre on the chest, so as long as the operator is facing the person you are usually guaranteed a stable shot. That's only one of many tools. We did have a flower vase that we were using but unfortunately we had an over enthusiastic gardener who poured too much water in the flowers!  Toby informs me that the camera will recover.

Gillian Findlay: You need the puddle cam.

Al Harrad: Next time!

Gillian Findlay: Simon you told us that you weren't entirely comfortable with the camera on.

Simon Bucks: I wasn't operating the camera I was just wired for sound, I wasn't particularly comfortable with it because I didn't like the idea of stitching up my friends and colleagues. I don't think I would have any problem stitching up a villain and sure we would all feel the same. I'm sorry to anybody I stitched up and I was genuinely interested in the things I was asking you. Really we just wanted to make the point about how easy it is to do it.

Gillian Findlay: Well it is easy and it's getting easier. Going undercover is as old as journalism itself but as Al has just told us and he's going to show us some more later on it's never been so easy to do for television. Technology has made it accessible, affordable and I would venture a guess that at small television stations around the world everybody has got a hidden camera in their arsenal. So the questions are, how are we using them, and are we using them responsibly? Are we over using them? Does covert reporting enhance our journalism or does it simply make our stories more interesting? And if making them interesting is part of the answer to that is there anything wrong with that? Those are just a few of the questions we want to get to today but I want to start by looking at some more video. Love them or hate them one thing you can say about a camera investigation is that they do attract an audience. People love to look at this stuff. This past year in Britain one of the most celebrated programmes was a BBC documentary called Secret Policeman, reporter Mark Daly went undercover as a police recruit to examine racism in the Greater Manchester Police.

(Runs tape)

I think you get the idea. Now joining us from London we have Mark Daly. Mark I think there's a lot of curiosity about how you made that documentary. First tell us why you came to the conclusion that it was necessary to go undercover to do the story?

Mark Daly: The BBC had wanted to mount an investigation into the Police Service for some time, especially after the McPherson Report round about '97 which followed the death of Stephen Lawrence. It found that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist and that the Police Service as a whole had a problem with racism. So as a result the BBC started looking at whether it would be possible to something about police racism. David Wilmott who was the then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police made what I thought was quite a bold statement when he admitted that his own force had a problem with racism so combining those two things with some anecdotal evidence we had about Greater Manchester, the BBC decided it would go to Manchester.

Gillian Findlay: Why undercover?

Mark Daly: I think the whole premise behind undercover journalism is if there is no other way to try and get to the truth of the matter, if you cannot find out what's going on by overt means, then covert must be the logical alternative. There was no other way that we could find out whether Greater Manchester Police had a problem with institutional racism .

Gillian Findlay: This was not just any investigation, this was a major undertaking. For those people in the room who do not know the story behind the story just give us a quick rundown of what actually went into making this.

Mark Daly: For me it was about a two year investigation, it had gone on for some time before I arrived at the BBC, there was maybe two or three years of development put into it. I joined the BBC in 2001 and spent a year developing it, it took me almost a year to get into the Police and once in I was there for about 7 ½ months and then a two or three month editing period, so it was a long haul and it cost quite a lot of money as well.

Gillian Findlay: And as we saw you were actually arrested at the end of it.

Mark Daly: It wasn't quite how I planned it to end, we'd planned that I was going to be in for about 7 ½ months and then be pulled out at a certain time, in fact I was going to come out two weeks after my arrest of our own accord, I was going to resign quietly citing family reasons and then go off and have plenty of time to get the thing together but it didn't quite work out like that; obviously I was arrested and put in prison for the night which was an experience.

Gillian Findlay: What was the ultimate impact of your film?

Mark Daly: It had a major impact. There was major outrage that racists like this could actually get into the police, that the application process had failed to weed them out. All of the officers involved, there were about eight, were sacked. There were another five who were sacked, as a result there have been wide ranging changes made to the application process, making it tougher for people like this to come in. The Commission for Racial Equality have launched a major investigation into racism in the police. They are due to report in February I think. The results have been quite far ranging. I think the police thought that they were winning the fight with racism, in fact that they had won it and that it wasn't a problem anymore, it was a problem in the 80s when the Brixton riots were happening. But I think this film showed that they still had a lot of work to do.

Gillian Findlay: So clearly we have a story with impact here and we're told it won just about every journalism award in Britain but for the purpose of this discussion and with Mark's indulgence I want to turn everything on its head for the moment. Consider this: here's a story in which the reporter, a) lied to get access, b) he falsely befriended fellow cadets, he set them up to incriminate themselves and when they did he betrayed everything they told him in what they thought was confidence. Now in a profession that clings to the ideals of truth and trust it could be argued that here's an example of both of those things being violated but and it is a very big but, in doing so mark Daly produced a very disturbing and compelling piece of journalism which as we've just heard has produced very big consequences. So if I can come back to you for a second Mark what does this ultimately teach us about this kind of journalism? That the end justifies the means?

Mark Daly: I think undoubtedly, all those things you mention weren't taken lightly. There were all sorts of human rights issues that had to be taken into consideration, we had to take into consideration the human rights of the people who had done nothing wrong, we tried to make sure that none of the innocent people were identified. Before I would turn on the camera to film any of the racists I would have to present a strong prima facae case back to my superiors at the BBC and then get permission to actually film them. So it was a stringent procedure which we had to adhere to. As far as betraying them is concerned, when someone is betraying criminal or anti-social tendencies like that I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Gillian Findlay: I want to include as may people as I can in this debate because this is really the nub of the issue. What do you think? What are your experiences? Is this good journalism?

Unidentified: I have a legal question. I was very surprised that the one officer was shown full face on camera and I wonder did he give his permission to do that or did you broadcast him without his permission?

Mark Daly: The eight officers we featured in the film were all identified and we did not seek permission for this. The BBC guidelines are that if someone is committing a criminal offence or is behaving in such a wild anti-social manner then the BBC is justified in identifying them. I felt that it would have been remiss of us not to identify them. Their behaviour was so outrageous and they should have never been in the police in the first place but since they were and having found that information we felt it our duty to make sure that they weren't in the police any longer.

Gillian Findlay: Adrian van Klaveren, the BBC obviously approved this project, why did you think this was justifiable journalism?

Adrian van Klaveren:  Looking at projects like this the BBC is trying to assess what is in the public interest and that's not the same as what is interesting to the public because that would cover a far greater range of projects. It's about trying to say is there something really important that we think we'll be able to tackle by doing this film, this project in this kind of way. For that you've got to work out what hypothesis you're working on, what is the first level of evidence? Is there something worthwhile here that makes it worth going into this? That we're not just going on a fishing expedition, we're not quite sure what's there but we'll do it in that way.

Gillian Findlay: But am I right that in Britain and Europe there is more of a trend toward this type of journalism?

Adrian van Klaveren: Of course, there's a lot more because as we've seen the technology makes it much easier and that's the thing that's changing that. Clearly there are concerns here, there are concerns that because we can do more we do far more than we should. There is a concern that some people are using this method to make things appear more sensational than they are, suddenly things look exciting because we can say we filmed this secretly, when actually you might have been able to go off and film this anyway. And there have been cases where we've stopped filming where it was going to be filmed secretly and we've looked hard and thought that there is another way of getting the material. So you've got to ask those kinds of questions.

Gillian Findlay: Can I turn to other broadcasters in other countries and ask about developments there? Esther Enkin, it's always a danger to ask your boss to answer a question!

Esther Enkin: I have a couple of questions. What are your thresholds, how strict are you guidelines? And for Mark, you said that you had to present a case before you turn on a camera, how many people did you target, how long did it take and in the course of the documentary did you explain that context of how you got there because I have a squeamishness about not being completely transparent, really proving those people weren't set up in some way.

Adrian van Klaveren: Well let me do the guidelines; we've got a clear system for how we actually do approve this secret filming because we do want to know how much is going on and on what basis. So the process is if an individual reporter or producer has a proposal for secret filming, they have to take it first of all to their immediate manager and discuss it there and then it has to be signed off by somebody senior at the BBC who then keeps a record of it as well. So there is a process there of discussion about what it is. They have to go through a procedure saying how are you going to go through with this secret filming? Are there any other ways of doing it? What justification and our guidelines give a set of things that you need to think about to give the justification.

Gillian Findlay: You've both said and alluded to Esther that there's too much of this going on and if I can just bring the debate back to that for a moment, maybe with a show of hands, do people believe that there's too much of this going on now, is the technology moving a head of us?

Nick Radlo: Freelance journalist UK: Yes I do have some concerns if there is a lot more of this how much danger you may be putting your filmmakers at, if they get discovered by criminals say and I do have a question for Mark Daly because I met him at Input in May where this film was shown and during the discussion afterwards we wanted to know how he had been discovered and I don't know whether Mark would like to explain how he was discovered and he was possibly shopped, can he talk about that?

Mark Daly:

Gillian Findlay: Mark can't hear us, do you know the answer to that?

Nick Radlo: During the discussion afterwards he was asked how he was discovered and he believed that someone had given the game away from within the BBC and we all came to the conclusion that this may have been done for publicity reasons because it made a hell of a fuss. The Home Secretary condemned the BBC for secret filming and this was before the programme was shown, after the programme was shown fine but before hand the BBC came in for a lot of criticism, so when the programme was shown it got a huge audience.

Adrian van Klaveren: Well I don't know all of the details in terms of what went on, clearly the risk of any project like this is that a number of people do know that it is going on and clearly there's a risk that it could be compromised in that way. I find it unthinkable that somebody would do that and clearly put somebody at some kind of physical danger for the purposes of publicity, I just cannot conceive of that happening.

Gillian Findlay: We will get to the issue of safety a little bit later as well so we will come back to this but if I can one more time try to return to the bigger question, is there anybody here who wants to take the absolutist view that we should not be doing this kind of journalism?

Rick Thompson, T Media: I was working for BBC News for a long time as a foreign editor and I didn't put my hand up to say that I am an absolutist, I just wanted to expand the subject out a little bit more. One of the things I did at the BBC for a while was look after our regional news and current affairs operations, including local radio; and one of the things that was growing up at that time was the idea that you could record telephone calls of people for broadcast on radio or on television and it's become such an interesting subject because so many newspaper reporters record their telephone calls they call it the electronic notebook. And I think when you say is too much of this going on one of the things that concerns me is that particularly in radio and particularly in local radio, I know that a lot of people record their telephone calls. Adrian was talking about the BBC guidelines which have been pretty strict for a long time, there are very few things in them that are called mandatory referral, which means that you can't do it without referring it up and this is one of them, secretly recording people but I do think that it's not just secret filming, secret recording is also very widespread.

Gillian Findlay: I want to go now and get the view in the US, where we are joined by Bob Steele of the Pointer Institute for Media Studies. Can you give us a sense because I know you have concerns about how widely used this has been in North America, can you tell us the kinds of egregious types of this that you have witnessed and what your concerns are?

Bob Steele: I believe that it's important to have hidden cameras in our arsenal, they are high power and they are also high risk and when used well to highlight systemic problems of racial discrimination or racism, when used to reveal the failures in systems of government, when they're used to reveal major problems in airport security for instance or other chicanery that's going on in government agencies it may be justified. But here in the States hidden cameras are too often used for a much less justifiable journalistic purpose. Just this week in Detroit there was a television station that used hidden cameras in its so called investigation on perverts in the park as it might be called, couples in vans who were having sex in the street outside public parks, that might be a justifiable story to do perhaps, if there's enough reason there to cover the story but to use hidden cameras in that reporting seems to me to be an outlandish justification for a form of deception and that story has been done in various forms in many markets across the country. Hidden cameras are also too often used on minor consumer stories that don't justify any form of deception and the reality is that any time we use hidden cameras there is a form of deception and as you said earlier that there is a matter of truth and trust that is essential at the core of journalism. When we go against that truth and trust and against that value of honesty, then we're taking some very serious risks.

Gillian Findlay: It has been a trend certainly in the last decade in North America.  What is driving this do you think?

Bob Steele: Competition is one of the factors that's driving it; the local television stations and to some extent the networks when there is some competitive equation tend to use techniques that may not be justifiable journalistically and professionally. I believe it's also driven by a copy-cat mentality, producers in Buffalo see something that's been done in Baltimore and they decide they'll do it too and they pick up the technique, and the technology as has been explained by your other speakers allows for multiple circumstances and I don't believe the thinking process in newsrooms has kept up with technology. I'm heartened when you have discussions among folks like you just have with the BBC who talk about the guideline, the clear system and involvement from senior executives as Mark Daly talked about.  He said there was a very stringent procedure that went into place before he was allowed to use hidden cameras in that investigative story on the Manchester Police. I believe that we should put those threshold approaches in place where we ask multiple questions about the justification for using a form of deception with hidden cameras, about the risks involved including the danger to the journalist involved, about the skill and craft that we bring to those stories because too often when we poorly use hidden cameras we create unfairness in the reporting process. And then as was discussed in your conference there, you have the matter of transparency and full disclosure is one of many essential steps.

Gillian Findlay: OK, I think we're agreeing that it's when you use them and how you use them, we've got some videotape now, two examples, both of them situations in which I think you could agree that using a hidden camera was obviously the only way that this story was going to be told. The first is a Sky News report about China's hidden AIDS problem and the second is Channel 4 commissioned documentary about North Korea.

(Runs tape)

That was from Channel 4 and we are now going to be joined by the head of news and current affairs there Dorothy Byrne. That cameraman who shot the last film has not been identified to this day.

Dorothy Byrne: No it would not be safe to identify him.

Gillian Findlay: He still continues to work in this way does he?

Dorothy Byrne: I wouldn't like to say.

Gillian Findlay: Understood. As I said earlier we want to get to the safety issues, but first, as somebody who commissions and has a lot of proposals coming across your desk for documentary pieces to be done undercover and with hidden cameras, what is your analysis of the trend?

Dorothy Byrne: This is a very powerful tool and we need to use it properly. I am concerned sometimes to receive proposals which I don't feel justify the secret filming but I have another concern as well, which is that I feel I now receive fewer proposal involving traditional journalistic methods, what you might call the old fashioned investigation involving investigating large numbers of documents over a long period of time. I seem to receive far fewer of those and I worry that not only that there's too much secret filming but that it's making people shy away from the really difficult journalism and in the end, we need that. We need whistleblowers to tell us things but we need analytical investigative journalism involving delving deep into archives etc and I'm worried that a lot of younger journalists don't find that sop appealing and want to do the secret filming.

Gillian Findlay: Esther Enkin, if I could come to you. Is old fashioned journalism better than the new journalism?

Esther Enkin: I think that the footage from North Korea is staggering and what's more staggering is the extraordinary risk that man is taking and his conviction and his bravery has to be lauded and in a circumstance like that I can really see making the decision but I agree with Dorothy, it disturbs me. There are no pictures but the Toronto Star where I came from proved through computer assisted reporting and looking at data over a long period of time that there was racial profiling.

Gillian Findlay: But Esther that's not great television!

Esther Enkin: As I said no pictures, sorry folks! And as somebody who's worked in radio and television I understand the imperative. But I'm also prissy and old fashioned enough to believe that the imperative of truth and transparency and of doing that hard work and digging is almost more critical and if it's not going to be great television then maybe that's not how you do it. With exceptions, I'm not an absolutist because otherwise I wouldn't have a job. Seriously, I'm not an absolutist. I can see the circumstances and the BBC has got some really stringent guidelines. The fear as always is that it becomes a gimmick frankly because you are looking for the pictures and the thrills and it's a shortcut.

Gillian Findlay: Mark Daly, in a nutshell people are saying that there is a lack of the old fashioned kind of digging, that a young journalist sees hidden cameras as a way of getting the story faster and I will say maybe in a more sensational way, what are your thoughts on that?

Mark Daly: I think that is a problem at the moment, certainly with my programme the very strong journalism had been done before I picked up a camera. We knew we were dealing with a problem situation. The other thing was that the BBC wouldn't have put somebody in that situation without having any proper journalistic experience and I think that's maybe what's happening today is that we're putting people in dangerous situations when they don't really know how to react. So I think that anyone who's engaging in undercover reporting must have a strong journalistic background. Also there is a lack of good old fashioned investigations these days - you get the little bit of paper that incriminates an organization, or a politician or a crook. I certainly think that's missing at the moment and something that I would like to get involved in.

Gillian Findlay: You're a young journalist; why is it intimidating, why is that kind of reporting not being done by your generation?

Mark Daly: I'd like to think it is by some of us. I'm involved in some stuff like that at the moment and I guess it's because the sensationalist undercover stuff will make your name much quicker than if you were turning out solid newspaper investigations. I can see the attraction for young journalists it's glamorous, it's very dangerous, it's an incredible adrenalin buzz, I've never experienced a buzz like it and I don't think I will again but it's no substitute for solid journalism.

Gillian Findlay: OK I'd like to go to two new guests both of whom have in some ways made their names doing this kind of reporting. One of them will be very familiar to many people in this room and that is Donal McIntyre who is joining us from London, host of McIntyre's Millions on Channel 5, and Allan Maraynes who is the Senior Investigative Producer at the NBC magazine programme Dateline. Allan if I can start with you do you think the pendulum has swung too far here?

Allan Maraynes : I'm not sure the pendulum has swung too far. I think the use of hidden cameras is in some cases necessary and in many cases the only way to tell a story. The question I haven't heard from anybody in specificity here is how any of the stories would have been done without hidden cameras most of the stories I've seen could have been done in a descriptive way in print but certainly wouldn't have illustrated the story.

Gillian Findlay: OK let's take a look at some tape because Dateline in particular has a reputation for pushing the envelope on some of this, and we have a clip here from a recent story about teenage internet chat rooms and the sexual predators who stalk them. As you'll see the Dateline producers didn't just hide cameras they helped to set a trap and to lure some of those alleged predators in.

(Runs tape)

Gillian Findlay:  Ok and correct me if I'm wrong but I think somewhere in the region of 19 people showed up at your door in the course of the investigation.

Allan Maraynes :  Yes I think in the course of a day and a half around 18 men showed up looking for what they thought was a 13 year old female.

Gillian Findlay:  All of whom you identified and I think there are some people who might look at that and say 'hey come on, this is entrapment'.  How would you respond to that? 

Allan Maraynes It was certainly not entrapment in that these fellows were certainly online to exploit some child themselves, we didn't bring them to a computer terminal and we didn't bring them to a chatroom, these fellows were online looking for somebody and what we did was to create a persona that would help us illustrate the magnitude of the problem.  The real reason we did this story was because we were absolutely staggered by the number of kids who were affected by this.

Gillian Findlay Allan, in this case, where is the line between being a journalist and an agent provocateur?  Where do you draw that line?

Allan Maraynes We try to be careful, we know we're not the police, although we did alert the authorities that we were doing this.  We didn't go willy nilly into a situation and set ourselves up as law enforcement and try and bust these fellows.  The group we worked with, this is their thing and they allowed us to observe what they do and in the end they post the names of these fellows on a website and law enforcement gets involved and it's up to the police to decide what to do. 

Gillian Findlay:  I know you've told me that at NBC and other fine journalistic institutions, there are strict policies and codes in place that guide journalists in this area but I'm wondering that as you have the debate there, how much of an issue is dramatic effect?  How much of a role does that play in the decision of whether to conduct an investigation?

Allan Maraynes :  Interestingly enough, I think that dramatic effect is a by product of this technique.  Certainly it doesn't hurt and we're not going to apologise for the fact that audiences are drawn to it. The question is why are they drawn to it?  I think the reason is that audiences want to experience unvarnished truth.  We try to make sure that the subjects we pick justify the light we shed on it. 

Gillian Findlay Can I put the same question to you Donal?  I don't think anyone that's seen the programmes would question that what you produce is good TV but is it always good journalism?

Donal MacIntyre Can I just backtrack quite a bit on some of the key points you have missed and not followed up.  I think that in terms of Dorothy's point about old fashioned journalism, and new journalism, the journalism that I do is the old fashioned sort, what you see and what you saw in Mark Daly's documentary and what you see that's broadcast on screen, is the tip of the iceberg.  Nine-tenths of the work that's done is under the radar, under the scrutiny of lawyers, editorial staff and right the way up, when I was at the BBC, to the Head of Programming, indeed even Greg Dyke.   Now that I'm at Channel 5 it goes up to the Head of Programming and the head of the channel.   So this is a very focused way of doing our journalism, it's not the only way, most of the people that do this work in Britain have a heritage in World in Action, making straight documentaries with paper trails.  I'll just give you an example of a paper trail.  'The Secret Policeman' had its inception with a meeting between me and a former Manchester policeman in 1996 and a memo I wrote to the editor of World in Action after Rodney King and it was gestated in World in Action in the hands of several executives right the way to Mark's brilliant investigation.   So you have to see how you have the one off investigation which is broadcast and creates tremendous impact, probably the most important undercover film ever broadcast in this country which moved government policy but if you look at the background there's eight years of hard work prior to that. 

Gillian Findlay:   Would you agree though Donal that because of the success of the work that you and others have done that there is now a generation of reporters out there who are doing this in ways that aren't as stringent as you've described?

Donal MacIntyre:  I think inevitably but if you take traditional journalism over cameras in war zones, you get good journalists and bad journalists.  I can't speak for other journalists or journalistic teams but I irritate, cajole and annoy editors by my forensic attitude to ethics and fact checking, and just very much traditional journalistic methods.   I think you have to understand you would think this is all about testosterone, and I took Mark's point that he got a great buzz out of undercover filming, I never got a buzz out of undercover filming, I was always only ever nervous, afraid of the ethical lines we were crossing, the safety of me and my team, and the ethics, safety and human rights issues for other people.   To that end, and even before we started the 'McIntyre Undercover' expedition four years ago, I initiated an academic research project with Professor Craig Mahoney on psychological support for journalists undercover and Professor Howard Otumba of City University in London to do a long term project and study of undercover methods and undercover journalism. 

Gillian Findlay Donal, can I just stop you there because we want to show some tape of one of your stories that actually leads us to a broader discussion about that.  We have a clip here from a documentary that Donal did and for those of you who may not know he's gone undercover to expose conditions in mental homes, he's gone undercover to expose abuses in the fashion industry, he's gone undercover to buy human parts in India, semtex in the former Yugoslavia, but it seems that one of the more dangerous things he's done is that he went undercover to find out what it was like to be mugged.  

(runs VT)

Gillian Findlay:  Pretty dramatic stuff.  Can I put the question out to the audience - reactions to that? 

Nick Radlo, freelance, UK:  What that clip doesn't show and it was, I think, an hour long programme, is that he had to walk around for hours trying to get mugged, he was walking the streets of Brixton trying to get mugged, he almost had a placard saying 'please mug me', so they were two incidents that took hours to happen.  He lost contact with his team which worked up the tension, there's more going on there than you suggest with this clip. 

Unidentified:   I think there's another dimension to the story and maybe this is a little bit harsh after what we've just seen but I'm concerned about the villains actually, the notion of crime and punishment in society means an appropriate punishment for every crime.  By exposing and identifying these criminals to their audiences, we are probably over-punishing them.  There is a punishment to every crime but they will live with that punishment in the eyes of the public for quite some time and I don't know what the impact will be on them and their families after they've been identified.  Identifying them for the authorities or the police might be a different issue but to be identified by millions of people for years after the punishment has been carried out on them poses another ethical question.   

Gillian Findlay Donal to go back to you, did you hear those questions?

Donal MacIntyre Well yes and first of all to go back to Nick, I think if he saw the programme, he will also acknowledge that the hour long programme, for the first half hour, was interspersed with traditional, Panorama/ World in Action investigative reportage, which was reflected in many of the other thirty or forty programmes done on street crime that year.  So that's the other part of the iceberg of the film.  I think it is true, and we made everybody aware in the programme, that far from being a place where you're automatically going to get mugged, there was quite a community spirit, and we reflected the fact that when I walked into dangerous areas, the prostitutes, tramps, drug addicts, the dispossessed, the people at the margins were the ones who said 'be careful, you could get mugged here', so we reflected that and actually it was quite good for Brixton.  We did it in Brixton because it was one of the highest areas of muggings in Britain, indeed in Europe.  So that's the factual background to that. 

Gillian Findlay Donal, I have to interrupt because we're getting a big frown here, Nick Radlo again.

Nick Radlo:  I don't remember when I was watching that programme, thinking of Panorama, but I do remember the laptop incident, you actually went off with this guy to a block of flats, something that no one in their right mind would do.  Why did you do that? 

Donal MacIntyre Well, you see Nick, you've got an interesting point there, because I do not presume that a black man offering to help me track down my laptop at twelve at night is automatically going to mug me.  I didn't actually think that, the origin of that story goes back to when my little brother used to work as a copy boy for Jimmy Breslin at the New York Daily News, he got mugged at gunpoint, and he eventually, for a New York Daily News article, as a copy boy for Breslin in the year Breslin won his Pulitzer, wrote an article about how he tracked down the family and the background of that mugger and how he told the story.  That's the background to my story.   You're not seeing the rest of the iceberg.  The other part of the iceberg is the effect on the villain and that's a very good point because we do carry a responsibility when we film and broadcast people and I'm glad to say that I can count Gary Booth, the man who mugged me, the man who drew a knife on me, is now a friend of mine, and does journalism work with me (laughter).  I think we do have a responsibility to follow on and to meet these characters and to help them.  We now lecture and meet with police and students and other people who came from his community, other young people, to talk about how we can, as young black males in poverty, stop them from going down this road of crime.  So there's more to the iceberg than Nick would acknowledge then. 

Gillian Findlay:  We have broadcasters here from all over and we want to try and involve some of them in a discussion about what is appropriate when you use these kinds of techniques.  Mohamed I see your hand up, would this ever happen in Cairo?  

Mohamed Gohar:  I'm thinking about using this technology in Cairo for a completely different purpose: to overcome the power of the authorities, because there is a lot of obstruction if you want to get your one camera through, you have to wait a few days before you can get permission to shoot in the streets of Cairo, there is a lot of local monopolies for TV companies, to film or shoot in places.

Gillian Findlay:  Could you do this?

Mohamed Gohar:  Coming in through the customs, I'll use one of your cameras and go through, I mean it's a new way of bypassing bureaucracy. 

Gillian Findlay:  In Egypt if you were ever to film an undercover investigation, would it ever be aired on Egyptian TV? 

Mohamed Gohar:  It doesn't mean that I don't try!

Unidentified, ITN London Question for Donal McIntyre if he's still here, just looking at the clip of the mugging, I wonder what he thinks in a nutshell, he actually exposed by going undercover because it seems that just watching the clip, and I didn't see the full programme, so there may have been a lot more in it, that what he exposed was that if you wander down a street after midnight with a mobile phone out and a laptop in your hand, you might get mugged, and I kind of know that.  I wonder whether he thinks that by going undercover, you have to justify it by uncovering something that we don't already know and that we can't achieve by other means.  

Donal MacIntyre ...to reflect the terrible scandal of street crime at that time.  The Prime Minister said, on the very day the programme was broadcast, that it was his number one priority, but we actually went out and demonstrated where the stolen goods were going, and we tracked our stolen phone six weeks later, all the way to Accra, in Ghana, because we put transmitters in the phone and two days before the programme was broadcast, I stood at Heathrow Terminal 4 and I recovered my phone.  We demonstrated a new trade route for old and dying technology in the west being exported through theft to poor and third world countries.  In many ways, it's an ecological use of technology, albeit through a violent route.

Gillian Findlay:  I think the question here is how much of the undercover camera do you use, how much is theatrics and how much is journalism and I know that that's a question being asked in the US as well so I want to bring Allan Maraynes  back.

Allan Maraynes :  The one question I have about that is what went into the decision making before the authorisation for that sequence?  I only say that because I'm envisioning the same discussion here, I have to say that would probably have been an easy no for us, because someone, and we have a very wise panel of judges, that we sit before hidden cameras are authorised for any sequence, and I'm sure someone might have said 'you might get killed doing that'  and I'm not sure there are many good answers back, unless you had a security team very close by, and the likelihood of any real danger would have been circumvented by having the security team.  For instance in the story about internet predators, which we accepted was coming right up to the line, that's about as extreme as we get when shooting hidden camera, the discussion came about as to whether any of these men that came in to that house might spook, might be ready to commit violence, and we took very specific measures to prevent that possibility.  So I'm curious as to whether there was an internal review that asked that question, and how it was resolved.

Donal MacIntyre:  We put a great deal of thought into that, but unfortunately the security broke down. But when you do undercover you are effectively in dangerous situations operating in war zone-type circumstances, albeit for a shorter period.  I think one of the big problems is that broadcasters, and I'm sure Dorothy Byrne will have a view on this, don't spend enough time thinking about the Health and Safety responsibilities.  Indeed the psychological pressures on some journalists, and it's something that I've been very keen to promote.

Gillian Findlay:  Donal you're not aware of this but a large part of this conference has been given over to talking about the health and protection of journalists in war zones.  I'd like to go back to Al for a second here, this is your business, you help to prepare these guys for their undercover activity, what are your thoughts, are we being cavalier with their safety? 

Al Harraden:  Donal was first sent down to me about eight years ago, and he was with us for about a week then and we went through all the different aspects of what I learnt because I used to film a lot myself undercover, so I thought it was about time to retire and pass it over to Donal, and I think we're very well known in the UK and all the people that come to our premises will not put anyone in a very dangerous situation to start with and they'll come to us and be trained up and then go into light situations.  I can't think of anyone that's been brought to us and suddenly said 'Al, can you get this person into this environment' and he's going into a crack den and he's dealing with gangsters.  I think in the UK they've got a very good responsibility to the overall training.  I personally would like to see more training but I suppose at the end of the day that comes down to budget and time. 

Unidentified:  Yes we're talking about the security of the undercover journalist, but to come back on the Mark Daly thing, the end justifies the means.   What if this identifiable Manchester policeman was stabbed by an extremist Pakistani for his racist speech, as for example we all know about Theo Van Gogh.

Gillian Findlay:  It's an interesting point.  Dorothy Byrne, are you with us still?  Does that resonate with you?

Dorothy Byrne Is it an issue of whether the person we secretly film will be at risk?  I think yes it is something that we consider a lot.  We've had that issue in particular with a convicted paedophile we identified, and we only made the decision after a lot of internal debate to identify him when it became clear, somewhat to our surprise that in fact, all the people in his neighbourhood knew in any case that he was a convicted paedophile but we alerted him and the police to the fact that we were about to show the footage.  The police didn't recommend that we didn't show it, and of course a reason for showing it was that we had some evidence of his continued activities following conviction and you could argue it round the other way, that it was important to identify this man, because he was apparently continuing in his criminal activity. 

Arnim Stauth I think we should remind ourselves of the criteria that we just set up half an hour ago.  That was find public interest, and only use hidden cameras when we can't obtain the story by any other means.  I must say, what I saw from Brixton, despite all respect for the courage it took, I don't think it met the criteria, because as we heard it was in the police files what was happening in Brixton already, the number of crimes, the way they were done, was already known.  If there had been the suspicion that the police themselves were taking part in the crime, that would have been a pubic interest reason to do a story like that so to provoke an attack, because walking around at midnight with a laptop isn't something that usually happens, to walk around for an hour presenting a laptop so that people can focus on it, make up their mind and then commit a crime, we should refrain from luring people into becoming criminals.  This is a line we should not cross because then we're not reporting on reality, we're creating it. 

Gillian Findlay So it makes you feel uncomfortable

Unidentified:    My first question is provocation, my second question is if you do that now and again in your programme I can understand that, you first find the topic and then do it but if you do it on a regular basis, how far do you have to come down with your own judgment if you're forced to have such a story every week or every month?  Because if nothing is happening, then you have to make something happen

Gillian Findlay:  Yes that's interesting and we do have an example to show that this isn't a British or American phenomenon, from Swedish TV.  They didn't take hidden cameras to expose crime or injustice of that sort; they actually tackled a political issue with it and took on real politicians in the course of an election campaign.  This was a piece that exposed professed liberal politicians who had very interesting private opinions on immigration.

(Runs VT)

Gillian Findlay:  If in doubt, deny!  I'm not saying that this is representative of all programming in any sense but does it strike anyone else as interesting that here we have examples of political reporting incorporating these cameras?  Is this something that maybe in other parts of Europe, you might see this as more a legitimate tool, than perhaps any of the other examples that we've shown today. 

Nancy Ing-Duclos, NBC Paris:  I have to admit that I'm totally drawn into them and mesmerised by them and sometimes when we say the end justifies the means, there's a message at the end of it.  But the one thing that keeps going over me is this is so voyeuristic.  It reminds me of a TV reality show, is this another form of TV reality?

Gillian Findlay:  Well is that one of the questions because we live in an age of TV reality?

Heaton Dyer, CBC:  I think it's an important point and we all have to live with the stunt factor. I'm drawn by something that Donal said and he made the point and I've seen the film, there was a lot of old school journalism in it but the reality is that the film was powerful and driven by a stunt.  I'm not offering that as a criticism but we have to be honest about the stunt factor and exactly as Nancy's saying, there is absolutely a voyeuristic dimension and absolutely a reality TV dimension.  I'm not saying it's driven by reality, because undercover has been around for a very long time, but the emotional response we get from this kind of journalism is the same as the emotional response we get from watching Big Brother.  The consequences and the guidelines are quite different but the emotional response is there.  I guess my final point would be if there is one thing that does concern me it is the reality that I was reminded of by the clip that we saw from NBC Dateline, the emergence of the branded hidden camera.  Everybody knows of Dateline and it's another Dateline hidden camera investigation.  We have to be honest that if we're branding them in this way, we're seeing them as an entertainment device. 

Gillian Findlay You're a news executive who has to look to the future of our business and plan programmes for the future, are we on the road to this, is it irreversible, should we be turning back, what should we be doing?

Heaton Dyer I just think we absolutely have to talk about thresholds, policies, we have to talk about practices and where are the public interest thresholds. Donal would make the point that because the Prime Minister that day identified street crime as the number one issue for him, that that legitimises the public interest in that issue.  I think we all have different judgements but I can accept why that is an argument.  I just think that the onus is on us in terms of our own internal policies and practices, to ensure that the thresholds are high and that the challenges to our own teams are strong and for those of us that are in those positions of having to challenge journalists, we have to and I'm sure we do take these responsibilities very seriously.

Gillian Findlay:  We're rapidly running out of time and I want to save a couple of minutes at the end so that Al can show us the future in terms of technology, so if I can just go back to a couple of our guests and just ask them where they think this is going.   Can we go to London first, is Donal there? 

Donal MacIntyre I think the debate here is very important and very encouraging and I agree with thresholds, and certainly that mugging programme, which I felt was justified, went through the same protocols as 'The Secret Policeman', in fact Mark Daly was part of my team on that particular project and the production team were the same team that did 'The Secret Policeman' so there are thresholds and that's certainly been on the border of anything I've done undercover.  It was long fought for and discussed long and hard.  What we have to remember is that we're not camera operators operating a secret camera, we're journalists who happen to be using covert techniques in rare circumstances, and only where they're justified.  The American school of journalism, of Woodward and Bernstein, would not allow me to go undercover and show abuse in a care home when any other way would not have exposed the vulnerability of the elderly in care in the programmes that I've done in recent years.    So I think we must remember that we must keep talking, the debate is fantastic and we must let academics into our world.  We should look after journalists undercover and remember we don't want operators undercover, we want journalists and it's not undercover journalism, it's old fashioned journalism using new tools, albeit it's been going since 1965, since World in Action, ITV in the 1970's, Adam Holloway's famous programme on the homeless in 1979, obviously ABC Foodline in the States and even Geraldo in the US made his reputation going undercover in a care home.   So keep our standards up and remember this is journalism, not undercover journalism.

Gillian Findlay:  Alright, leaving Geraldo aside, let's go to Allan Maraynes for his final thoughts.  Where are we going with this Alan, what's the future? 

Allan Maraynes I'd like to point out that what's really happening I think is that TV technology is catching up with what the pencil has been doing for a hundred years with newspaper print reporters.   No one will deny that print reporters do not always announce their presence at a scene, especially enterprise reporters for example from newspapers, they have their pencil, they describe what they saw, people don't always know that a reporter is present, and they go back and report what they've seen.  But what's happening now is that our technology is allowing us to have that pencil where we used to have what one journalist called the £600 pencil!  It's getting smaller and we're catching up with what newspaper reporters have been doing for years. 

Gillian Findlay:  Bob Steele can we go to you, it's a pretty powerful pencil, are you concerned about how we're going to use it in the future? 

Bob Steele:  Well, let's applaud the best of undercover journalism and respect the use of hidden cameras when used justifiably, too often we shine the light of scrutiny inappropriately when we use hidden cameras.  Too often we focus on the mugger; too often we ignore the police department's responsibility to measure up in terms of their responsibility to protect the public.   Too often we focus on the mechanic with the hidden camera, not on the auto dealer that has allowed the mechanic to short change the driver and drive with unsafe brakes.  Too often we fail to focus on the auto-maker who allows the car dealer who allowed the mechanic to carry out unsafe practices, too often we focus on the graduate students that are teaching classes with inadequate English language skills here in the States for instance.  We fail to hold the university system accountable for shamelessly using too many graduate students, with inappropriate language skills, to teach the courses.   In other words we don't use hidden cameras to hold people accountable, we use them as gimmicks to short change substantive story telling technique.  Too often we use hidden cameras inappropriately from a technique standpoint, we take hidden camera footage and we slow-mo it in ways in which it does not portray reality but alters reality in a way that accuracy and fairness are lost.   So if we are going to use hidden cameras, the threshold as others have said, must be exceptionally high.  The standards of practice must be nailed down to the most significant and important levels of journalistic purpose and the vetting process must be one which is exceptionally substantive

Gillian Findlay:  Dorothy Byrne if you're still with us, we'll give the last word to you.

Dorothy Byrne:  I agree with all that, it's easy to secretly film the little guy but how many evil tyrants have you seen secretly filmed?   But of course if anybody could get into the offices of George Bush to secretly film in the White House, that would be extremely interesting.  Unfortunately that is not going to happen. 

Gillian Findlay:  Actually we do have Mark Daly so as we started with him, we will finish with him. 

Mark Daly:  I think there is a real danger that covert methods are being overused at the moment and we need to be really careful with it, that we only use them when it's deserved and I think the other thing that's important is that it's much, much harder to use undercover or covert methods because everyone expects it now, all the organisations and all the criminals, they're all looking over their shoulders and some of the recent undercover films that have been broadcast, the subject has been on to the operative so the result of that would be that in order to get into these situations, we're going to have to do the strong journalism in order to get someone on the inside to enable them to give us the nod in, like whistleblowers.  I think the future is bright, just as long as we recognise that it's just another tool in the box. 

Gillian Findlay:  Thanks to all our guests and all the people that contributed here.