The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
“One of the more depressing reports I’ve seen in a long time,” said Matt Lauer, the “Today” show host, after a report showed unsettling lapses in security.
“What we uncovered may shock you,” Chuck Scarborough warned viewers of WNBC in New York.
Similarly, an anchor with the NBC affiliate in St. Louis prefaced a story by saying, “Some of it will disturb you.”
School shootings, especially the 2012 attack in Newtown, Conn., have prompted not just a reassessment of safety measures, but also a rash of efforts by news organizations in recent months to assess the effectiveness of safety protocols. But these episodes have raised broader questions about the ethical and practical implications of this type of reporting. In some cases, things can go disturbingly wrong.
That’s what happened in suburban St. Louis in January when an employee of the news channel KSDK walked into Kirkwood High School unannounced and began to roam the hallways. After several minutes, he aroused the suspicion of the school’s office staff.
Soon, the whole school was in lockdown. Police officers rushed to the scene, teachers turned off the lights and crowded students into the corners of their classrooms, and worried parents raced to check on their children.
Jen Wilton, who has two sons at the school, said she was frightened when one of them texted to tell her about the lockdown. The news station had crossed the line, she said.
“They certainly didn’t do me any service,” she said. “I have a few more gray hairs because of it, and it terrified my kids and a lot of other kids.”
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
“I think that for a news organization to just go on this type of random fishing expedition, there has to be a really good journalistic purpose,” said Bob Steele, a professor of journalism ethics at DePauw University. “There has to be some reason that you’re doing that, that you are testing something in particular based on some sort of evidence other than just, ‘school security is a problem in our country.’ ”
Covertly testing the public defense structure has essentially become a tradition for reporters. After the Sept. 11 attacks, several outlets tried to sneak banned items through airport security lines. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, a Tampa television station carried out the ill-conceived stunt of parking a Ryder truck in front of a federal building and walking away. In 2011, a newspaper parked a car at a spot considered potentially vulnerable near the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City, to test the police response.
The episodes often do not end smoothly. The Tampa reporter was detained, questioned and scolded by federal agents before being released. In Fargo, N.D., a correspondent who entered a school clandestinely in December was investigated for trespassing but avoided charges when her station agreed to keep her away from school-related news coverage for 90 days.
But some journalists contend that the news value of covert reporting outweighs the potential downsides. The story that was broadcast during the “Today” show in December served as a warning to parents that they should become aware of what is going on in their children’s schools, said Alexandra Wallace, senior vice president of NBC News. In that news package, a reporter visited five schools in the New York area and was able to get into one without being stopped by any security guards or school staff.
“I don’t know how you see what the truth is if you don’t go in that way,” Ms. Wallace said, referring to the hidden camera technique. “The moment you show up with a big camera, things look a lot better.”
Ms. Wallace, who has two school-age children, says she and other parents regularly think about school safety precautions. Indeed, news outlets often portray themselves as valuable members of the community in framing their undercover reports. Jeff Rossen, who reported the “Today” show piece, opened by saying that his daughter was in elementary school, “so this really hits home for me.”
Al Tompkins, the senior faculty for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, said that this approach missed the mark.
“What happens is you’re spending all this energy and time investigating school safety when that’s already the single safest place for your child anyway,” he said, adding that this “sort of reaffirms the false notion that my kids are really in danger at school when they’re not.”
News outlets should also weigh the risk of what they are doing, said Mr. Steele, the DePauw professor. For instance, he asked, what if wandering into a school caused such alarm that the school security officer pulled out a gun? How would the reporter react in such a situation?
NBC News consulted its lawyers and school security experts, and carefully studied the school policies and state laws before undertaking its report for the “Today” show, Ms. Wallace said. KSDK opened its report in January by saying that it “spent a lot of time determining how to approach it from a procedural and legal standpoint.”
But in St. Louis, something clearly went wrong.
KSDK was not able to gain access to four of the five schools it tried to enter. But at Kirkwood High School, John Kelly, a KSDK employee, walked in and wandered the corridors for more than three minutes before going to the office and asking to speak with someone about school security.
Without identifying himself as a reporter, he left his name and phone number and asked where the bathroom was. When he left and went off in a different direction, it raised alarms.
Staff members called his phone number and it went to his voice mail, which identified him as a KSDK employee. When the school called the station to confirm, the station would not do so, even though school officials said they would otherwise have to order a lockdown. Soon afterward, that’s exactly what they did.
Thomas Williams, the Kirkwood school district superintendent, was outraged.
“Is it O.K. for them to set a fire and see how fast the fire department responds?” he asked. “It’s a safety issue. It’s not responsible. It’s the wrong way to do it.”
After initially defending its report, KSDK apologized to Mr. Williams, who said the station told him that the people who could have verified the reporter’s identity were at lunch when the school called. In a subsequent apology that led its newscast three days after the episode, the station said it was changing its practices to make sure that it never happened again, though it did not specify what changes it was making.
Despite the potential pitfalls, some community members and school officials are in favor of undercover reports.
Sonya Hampton, the PTA president at the Sojourner Truth school in Harlem, applauded the WNBC investigation, in which a reporter was able to gain unimpeded access to seven of the 10 New York City schools it approached. (Sojourner was not part of the experiment.)
“If you were doing your job, you would have never let them get there,” Ms. Hampton said. “They caught you off guard. If that’s what it takes to get attention, then, yeah, that’s a good journalist.”
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