How Much May One Lie To Get the Truth?

Professionally compelled to get the facts, reporters have long resorted to deception. As far back as 1886, a brash young journalist who called herself Nel lie Bly feigned insanity to expose the inhuman conditions in a mental hospital. And in 1919, Herbert Bayard Swope passed himself off as a diplomat, outfitted with cutaway coat and chauffeured limousine, to provide a firsthand account of peace-treaty negotiations at Versailles. Last week, as the result of a National Labor Relations Board decision, the concept of what journalists call "enterprising reporting" was subjected to Government review.

Not Acceptable. At the center of the case was Robert B. Coram, 30, an aggressive and productive reporter who was fired last year by the Atlanta Journal for "unethical practice in obtaining news." His offense had been to deceive a state liquor-control officer; to get a story about nightclub raids, Coram told the officer that his superior, Revenue Commissioner Peyton Hawes, wanted him to tell all. The officer believed Coram and, without checking with Hawes, proceeded to talk.

Even though the charge of deceit against him was true, Coram contended, the Journal had no right to fire him. He and other Journal reporters had often used such tactics, and the paper had never complained. N.L.R.B. Trial Examiner James F. Foley disagreed. Although allowing that "certain deception is accepted as a means of getting a story," Foley ruled that "Coram's conduct is not acceptable as permissible conduct," and that he had indeed been guilty of unethical journalistic behavior. His dismissal was upheld.

Second Wallet. It was a debatable judgment. Coram's deception was certainly no more flagrant than that of hundreds of other reporters who misrepresent themselves to get their stories. "Any good police reporter," says a Chicago city editor, "will get a story out of a policeman by posing as one of his ultimate superiors--a guy who is too highly placed for the patrolman to know whether he is talking to the deputy superintendent or not. It is not something the city desk can condone, exactly. But you don't ask how they got the story, either."

"The ruse is part of every reporter's equipment," agrees Melvin Mencher, an associate professor of investigative reporting at the Columbia School of Journalism. Mencher, a former United Press reporter, says he always carried a second wallet when working on a story. The wallet contained a social security card and credit cards to prove whatever identity he had chosen. He advises his students to assume false identities when necessary, if for no other reason than to "become a part of what you want to write about."

Indeed, much important reporting is done by writers who have taken on new identities to gain insight into the problems of others. Seldom has the American Negro's plight been as convincingly portrayed as in Black Like Me; its white author, John Howard Griffin, darkened his skin and spent a month passing as a black in the South.

There are hundreds of less noble, but no less valid, examples. Coleen Dishon of the Chicago Daily News had a phony invitation printed so her society editor could attend the 1967 wedding of Republican Senator Charles Percy's daughter Sharon Lee to Democrat John D. Rockefeller IV. Crusty Harry Romanoff, 76, of the Chicago American never leaves his desk, built a spectacular career on telephone impersonation. Known to admiring colleagues as "the Heifetz of the telephone," Romanoff achieved his greatest performance in covering the 1966 mass murder of eight Chicago student nurses, when he 1) extracted the gory details of the crime from a policeman by pretending to be the Cook County coroner, 2) landed an exclusive story on Suspect Richard Speck by convincing Speck's mother that he was her son's attorney.

Columnist Jimmy Breslin greets the ethics question with typical cynicism: "It's all a game," he says about the matter of protecting sources. "Nobody's telling you nothing he doesn't want to see in print. They say, 'Don't print it' and they mean 'Print it.' So I say I won't, and I mean I will. Flimflam has gotta be met with equal flimflam. I don't regard anything as private--as long as I'm talking to public people."

Many reporters would disagree. There is no formula--and there can be none--to establish how far a newsman should be allowed to go in quest of the truth. Each reporter must decide for himself whether the importance of the facts he is after justifies the compromises he must make to get at them. But there are moral as well as practical limits. In the long run, journalism cannot be based on habitual deceit--if only because a reporter who practices it would lose both his credibility and his sources.

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