When Investigative Journalism Went Undercover: Situated Journalistic Ethics and Undercover Performance in China

This study adopts the perspective of cultural pragmatics to consider the undercover practices used in investigative journalism as a form of undercover performance. To perform the journalistic role of watchdog, journalists engaged in undercover performance refine the institutional script of professionalism to incorporate a deviant and temporary script for use in immersive investigations. In switching from a journalistic role to one of fakery, they must perform subtle boundary management by accommodating a deviant script justified by situated journalistic ethics while struggling to adhere to the professional code entailed by normative scripts. This study analyzes narratives of China’s investigative journalists on their undercover reporting, mainly from before 2015, and demonstrates how Chinese investigative journalists negotiated the professional and fake scripts in their role performance, encompassing their embodied enactment and reflective narration. It shows how Chinese investigative journalists, facing significant institutional constraints, reformulated the watchdog role of investigative journalism and its corresponding script while constructing a discourse that emphasized the situatedness of journalistic ethics to justify this reformulation. The research also demonstrates the divergence in undercover performance between journalists from central-level and lower-level mass media.