Ethical, Revealing, or Both?

When two journalists from Philidephia's "City Paper" went undercover to report on how the Clinton and Obama campaigns work, the editors knew ethical issues would come up soon after publishing the stories.

The stories came out this week with Mike Newall reporting on the Obama campaign and Tom Namako on the Clinton campaign. Names in the stories were changed and both identify the reporters as being undercover during their investigation. Does that still make it ethical to write the story? The editors of "City Paper" think so:

Sometimes, in the interest of serving the public and fulfilling what we feel to be a higher calling, it's what we have to do. Running the story is not a decision we made lightly. We went to a lot of sources — from newspaper vets to lawyers near and far — and finally to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics:

"Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story."

Huffington Post's Jay Rosen would agree: "Ethical? Maybe. Revealing? Absolutely."

I agree with both the editors and Rosen, these stories provided substantial information that the public would both be interested in and need to know. Therein lies the truth of how campaign offices work.