she is a professor of journalism at nyu. professor kroeger, what is the definition of undercover reporting? >> guest: undercover reporting is a subset of investigative reporting that usually involves reporters engaged informs the deceased covering, blending in, actually disguising, depending on the thousand permutations of how to do undercover reporting. >> host: as a legitimate reporting? >> guest: i think in many cases yes, in some cases no. the book argues for the legitimacy of the forum, which is a bit of a contrary decision. >> host: how do you make it legitimate? >> guest: by observing the import guidelines, which would include being sure there is no other effect way to tell the story. some would say no other race but i did not. i would say no other effective

and powerful way of telling the story because what you are after journalism is to bring attention to an issue, especially in cases of poor do we are close institutions you can see and things going on that might not be all right, we would like to bring us to public attention not only to get those empowered to act. >> host: what is an example of legitimate undercover reporting? >> guest: well, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples going back to the 1840s by my measure. this field is usually considered to have started about the 1880s with the subject of my first book, the biography of billy blades, but actually i've been able in this effort too dated to the 1840s yet there are fantastic episodes of the porters from the north going south to understand slavery and actually not allow pollution

movement. said they would let say go to a slave auction, posing as a buyer and that was a fantastic ruse because you walked around with a catalog so it can be a way to take no very quietly. you have the possibility of talking to other people slaves legitimately because you could be assessing what you would like to purchase. you get to talk to other buyers. you get to talk to voters. it was kind of one-stop shopping for a reporter who was trying to really understand more about what was involved. so that for me is a great example and there are many, many episodes of this, largely for the new york tribune, the big advocate of doing this kind of work. in other cases, reporters posed as neither reporters at the south and work for a southern newspapers to be in a position to gather information. reporters often without saying

what the reporter would claim to have been a western correspondent so that they wouldn't bring attention on themselves, working in the south, that way able to gather viewpoints from one side and the other, enabling reporting to be richer. they would often write with no name under a peace to you or something like that, some sort of initials or other moniker and then would send the work back coded so the work could get through without getting them in trouble because they would've been tarred and feathered and for now. >> host: is the goal of undercover reporting social change? >> guest: often. sometimes it really is to give us a window into institutions and social situations that very deliberately why the public out. mental hospitals, prisons, norma hospitals, places such as that. prisons as i said. other times it could just be to understand an extremist movement

lets say what we would infiltrate to understand more about what the movement was up to. >> host: in your book you write the criteria for inclusion in the book and the database is a very white tent intermingling all types of media of the main focus of journalism for significant purpose that required mostly physical acts deception by reporters or their surrogates and shadowing and blending in with the crowd radically altered identities excluded for the most part are works designated as fiction or works that are at least partly fictionalized. what is a famous example of that? >> guest: this'll make you sad. court a while involved a lot of composite characters so popular and so much of an inspiration or people who do this work later on that i had to include it. acting sinclair with the jungle of course is a work of fiction.

if you read the literature and also his own writing about it at the time contemporaneously, he says that there are almost no elements of the books that were fictionalized, the most of it was the reporting he received we documented after the five weeks he spent in chicago. so he would make the claim that it is not fiction except for the weaving of the narrative, the storyline. >> host: what was the effect of the jungle? >> guest: think about this. we are still talking about it and i can't tell you how many times since then someone has done in undercover exposé. there is something about the food chain that's really important to eyes and people really are viscerally affect the psc said, site, you sat through the heart. he wanted to do something for the workers. but what he had was this some night and the examples of the way he was treated and the lives

of the people around the life really is a touch people in a different way. there were actually regulations that came in the aftermath of the book. so he actually did affect policy, which was really quite some name and it made him very famous and everything he really wanted to be. so that is very, very important to him following and jack lemmon's weight. >> host: you talk about jacklin and well known for call of the wild, the people of the best for something else he wrote. >> host: that was a young man suffer. he went to the east end of london. he got himself some shabby clothes and lived among the locals for a period of two months and made friends with it down and out in every kind of way and really presented this really presented to assess the safety of the sort of quasi-sociological study of the group of people under difficult

conditions. it was important for him under the publishers, though the book was a quite popular and it was part of what made him i think mostly he did it for income, but a lot of writers do that he was quite effective with it and it is something we still value. >> host: professor kroeger, what was the deception of opting sinclair? >> guest: not match. that is what is interesting, but it has this great undercover reputation. the fact is all he did was he dressed shabbily anyway, so he dressed as the dress. when he arrived in chicago, you want to the hotel and announced he was there to save the working man. he was upfront about it. when he visited the slaughterhouses, he carried a lunch pail, a dinner pail as he called it, which gave the

impression he was among his people and this is the route that reporters often have used. there were stories and lesser episodes of undercover reporting, where a reporter at a crime scene will put the notebook in his pocket to look like a detective, just wear a trenchcoat, something that gives off another impression and let people think what they may. so i think that is what he did. because he spent so much time with everyone i was around, while someone was telling a story he'd be wandering into this little into this lotrimin tablet of movement that is how he informed himself. >> host: who is now a place? >> guest: who was nellie bly? what a question. nellie bly is a young reporter at the 1880s and 1890s working for the new york world. she died young. she died 30 years later -- five years later who really became the most visible exponent of

journalism, which was a form at the time that involved reporters posing in various poses to gain information. this predates what we call serious investigative reporting because it was one episode all about me, what i did when i went in and what i saw. she started with the world doing a story about wanting to get into the insane asylum's which is not roosevelt island in new york, the home of all the thoughts of modern manhattan is the guidebook called it. the prisons, the insane asylum's and everything was just shoved onto this island. there have been reports in the press over the preceding couple of months that there was wrongdoing and doctors were misbehaving with patients, that things were not right. so she wanted to go inside. she checked into a boarding house, that are so committed and

stay there for 10 days and this is very carefully planned by the paper. there was an exit strategy all figured out. and when she came out, she wrote this extraordinary piece about her experience, which actually wasn't the first. it turns out 10 years later one of the editors had done something similar. a male, but not with nearly the effect of this 22-year-old young woman with the lost waste and waste like appearance who came out to write this hair would entail and actually created change. there was a special appropriation made to improve conditions in the aftermath of her report. from there, she went on to do many others. interestingly, only to a half years of her life was spent doing it and yet here we are talking about her in the 150th year since her birth.

i often wonder why there was a national history day. you know about this at the middle-school children's program that every year for the last 20 years of the wrote the book, i have had no fewer than five or six and sometimes as many as dirty girls who are fascinated by nellie blog and find a way to make her fit whatever this year's theme is. every year she seems to fit. i had that kind of experience as a 10-year-old reading a juvenile biography. when the book came out, we found out many women reporters had an experience exactly like mine because so many reviews started with i was a girl of 10. it astounds me about the great women reporters that have followed her male reporters are just reporters, but she retains this aura of fascination with her gumption and what she was able to accomplish. for me at the time it was i

don't have to be a nurse. this is great. i don't have to be a teacher. i can be a journalist. i don't think that is what it is now obviously because so much is open to women. but it delights me over and over again to see that she still has that kind of effect. probably because what she did was about social good. even if she were posing as a chorus girl, it was to show that they were not harlots, but often supporting widowed mothers or it was work they did because they had to, that sort of thing. >> host: a lot of large newspapers have done this over the years. "l.a. times," "washington post," some of the cutbacks in the newspaper industry led to cutbacks in this type of journalism? >> guest: i can't answer that directly, but there is been many things that have happened since the late 1970s but of cause

newspapers to take another look at that. there have been episodes like food lion or chiquita banana with the cincinnati inquirer episodes that have made people really have caused about doing it. it's expensive. it takes lots of planning. it takes a certain kind of reporter who's willing to do it. we do find the magazines have picked it up now with them in the newspapers. newspapers do things like airport security. they send them through to see how the tsa is performing and those kinds of things you would see relatively frequently. what you don't see is the big medicaid investigation, the things that used to be much more common for newspapers to do. part of it is ethical concerns, not been subject to the kinds of scrutiny that may not be welcome. i think also cost. cost and time in the staff needed because you could spend nine months on some name and find out it wasn't there.

that could happen. the risks in that sense or large economically. >> host: are there ethical concerns to this type of reporting? >> guest: of course. it's about deception. it is naturally about deception, so making that choice, making that decision is a very big one. back to your original position, you have to decide if what you are doing is really worth it. some of the ones you see that people do is posing as a homeless person with one of those yesterday for a day. it gets your attention because this kind of narrative gets your attention. that is enough of a reason to decide to take the kind of ethical leaves that this often required. and yet there were stories where you might be discovering wrongdoing where it makes very, very good sense. of course i would heartily subscribe to that. >> host: does congress react to these investigations? >> guest: assert they did in

the case of the "washington post" walter reid, which is of course was not an undercover operation in any way and certainly been opposed by his editors at the time. she made a very big point of telling me that i would suggest a lot of the techniques they used to be able to stay there for four months undetected, which was very poured in to the work sound alike to me like the kinds of things that people do when they are embarking on an operation that may bear the label undercover under my very white definition. >> host: brooke kroeger, what about james o'keefe, npr? >> guest: good question. i would widen that, not to pick on mr. o'keefe, but for me the issue is not who does it, that's not so important to me. i said this before. it is really the execution of

the work. so it has been very common for decades for newspapers or magazines or television stations to partner with other government associations, humane societies, activists of various kinds. this is not unusual to do really good work. slavery is almost always a topic done with this organization. if you're trying to go around the world come you obviously go to the people who really know where things are happening or how they are happening. in the case of better government associations, they cited this as a matter of course. why would you partner with them? the way i explain it in the book and a very helpful example to understand the difference between activism and journalism as let's say in fact this has been with npr came under a cloud with the o'keefe exposé, at the

same time, the humane society was doing investigation. i think it was a smithfield plant passion feedback as i'm not sure. nobody gets upset about animal cruelty. we are all of that page. i imagine the people who run these big establishments might have a problem with it, but generally speaking we are all kind of with teeth about not hurting animals unnecessarily, right? but there is no discussion about that. people feel very strongly about npr on one side or the other and this caused huge controversy both happening the same on as i was writing in the book and this is really interesting because this isn't about what you did. this is about things that are controversial. so when we get into controversy, people take different positions they really have nothing to do with the word you said on the question is what is the quality of the work? if you are editing a tape to display one position, for me you

were out of the journalistic and that doesn't work. but if the work stands out too but we would consider a high journalistic standards, whoever is produced it, because right now sources codirect. i think that is something for the good in attention, but that hasn't always been the case. >> host: prior to becoming professor of journalism at nyu, did you ever participate in undercover reporting? >> guest: i was a reporter for many years. they also wrote for magazines and newspapers. it sort of done it all. but i've never done undercover reporting. have been situations where blended in and let people think what they want about who i was. but i've certainly done. i think most reporters have. but no real undercover operation. what fascinates me and i think it is a piece about my work is

deception for good purpose. i'm not is a very interested in that because they keep writing about it in different ways. >> host: what is an illegitimate use of undercover reporting? >> guest: that's a good question. illegitimate. illegal would be one you probably should not break the law is a good baseline position to take. i can imagine cases where you might break the law, but as a general rule, don't. something silly, you know, and nellie bly's day, it might be many of her imitators who do things like stand outside the union club, which is a prestigious social club in new york as a flower sales grow waiting to see who solicited you, you know, that sort of thing, silly things that are illegitimate. i don't think it is illegitimate to penetrate public institutions that we should know more about.

i think it is good to know if mental patients are being mistreated, if hospitals are unsanitary and some of the great exposés have been about hospitals. do you want to hear one of my favorite ones? in the 1970s, william gaines who was a reporter for the "chicago tribune," and port investigative reporter, there is a task force called the tribune passwords that was involved in investigative work and a lot of their work to involve some undercover techniques until that became not a fashion for reasons we talked about. they got a call from a disgruntled janitor cleaning that while he was working at the hospital, he had been asked numerous times to go into the operating room, putting down his mop in his filthy clothes and we'll patients, unconscious patients from the operating room to their brooms. this is pretty horrific, right?

and this is a really great ulceration or by undercover reporting can be important. so i like it especially. so they decided they needed to get him hired as a jihad under an example and reporter at the found out exactly what they were looking for it and they sent him so he would actually get the job. he worked for a week. while he was there, he notices that whole families are getting their tonsils out, like five members of one family, which did seem a bit odd. so he reports to the desk and of course they do the medicaid examination and of course this is public record. you could find this out, but who would know to ask them why someone had witnessed it? who would know to ask? so that's a really good reason for being on site, don't you think? in addition to that, six different times he was asked to go into the operating room, putting down his mop in wheeling a patient out. it was one story and a long and

very granting series that won the pulitzer prize. interestingly, what anyone who is in this world thinks about these things is william gaines posing as a janitor. it was 11,000 word story, 900 words. i don't think i counted them, but not hugely long, with a great picture of him with a mop in the middle. he often said i feel like i won the pulitzer for being a janitor, not a journalist. but what it says to me is how port it is that there be merited strengths along with the rest of the story that you wonder how much impact one would have that is just the harder facts, resold in the does through third party. it somehow just doesn't have the same power and yet it really would emphasize just one piece in a very large, very, very well documented series. the hospital was closed within

months. no one would go there. they went bankrupt over it. >> host: transcendent come to your students. do students. you have to do in? >> guest: i once taught a course in undercover reporting and now we teach one similar to observational journalism, which my colleague ted for today. no one has them do it and the reason is in 13 weeks you can't do anything that really what matters. i mean, you really can't. the timeframe really constricts. i have students who use these to the extent obviously we consider them very carefully. usually for much longer at the says, a much longer form, not the kind of thing you would do. in 13 weeks i would have them weeks i would have them take one episode and really study down the way i like to do. >> host: how has teaching journalism changed over the years given the changes in the

industry? >> guest: it has changed a lot, but it's also stayed the same. we just had a panel with nashville talking about their moves into global reporting. i've been the global program at nyu, the masters program. each one of them in these very, very edgy organizations that really is still about hard-core reporting, the best work is done this way, et cetera. of course with added legions of legions of multimedia and training to be able to do everything. but that iraq is reporting on the writing and it's still the bedrock. >> host: here is the book "undercover reporting" the truth about deception. the author, journalism professor, brooke kroeger. >> guest: thank you.

>> up next, learn how to win it in the oneida tribe or came into the green bay area in the late 1970s. from mike hoeft, the author of "the bingo queens of oneida." >> we are sitting today in the greed more activity center, in addition where bingo was played. this has some spot but she is very bixby admitted and i wrote a book that these two women. they are the two bombs that help start oneida bingo. sandy manheim framer and thelma webster, the oneida tribe is not originally from wisconsin. they are one of the six nations of the iroquois confederacy originally ancestor homelands in upstate new york. the women were always influential political

counselors. they were the farmers. they grew the three sister crops of corn, beans and squash. they hold a lot of power in society. there is sided with the american colonists during the revolutionary war. after the war of 1812, unitas were forced to relocate like a lot of native nations they were forced west and oneida broke up into three communities. one in canada, one that stated new york and once i came to wisconsin. so when wisconsin, at the oneida reservation is just as they green bay, it is the right angular reservation tribal, nontradable parcels of land. it is interesting that about half the population lives below the pove