When It’s OK to Spy

News-gathering should be about truth, not deception. There are extremely rare times, though, when the end justifies the means, and deception is the only way to expose truth or give it the weight and emphasis it demands.

Thus, among tools of deceit, the hidden camera.

Indeed, the overused and abused hidden camera: long the spy gizmo of choice on tabloid shows and especially prevalent on local newscasts during ratings sweeps months like November, when stations tend, more than usual, not to let content interfere with style, gimmickry and titillation.

Such as last week’s gratuitous use of hidden cameras to juice up the thinnest of stories on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and KCOP-TV Channel 13. And Monday night’s artificially inflated “special Fox undercover report on peeping cams,” in which KTTV-TV Channel 11, by repeatedly showing this snoop footage that a Floridian had secretly aimed up the skirts of females to market on the Internet, turned voyeuristic and did some serious peeping of its own, even while discreetly black-dotting portions.

Yet there’s also the hidden camera of ABC’s “PrimeTime Live,” once used to disclose abuses in a home for the mentally retarded, for example. And used prominently in its 1992 expose of alleged unsanitary food practices by the Food Lion chain that led to this year’s $5.5-million jury award against ABC (later reduced to $315,000) on the basis that two of its producers had committed fraud and trespass in going undercover as employees of the firm.

However flawed the execution, and whatever the result of the legal case (which ABC is appealing), the cause was just.

As it is, most definitely, on KCBS-TV Channel 2 this week.

Just as Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 book, “The Jungle,” exposed unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry and led to reform, so, too, is Channel 2 now aiming its own narrower laser light at many Southland restaurants that it says “repeatedly fail” inspections by the Los Angeles County Department of Health yet remain open.

The reporter is Joel Grover, the producer Adam Symson, the work, aired on the station’s 11 p.m. newscasts, important and indelible, the result of a four-month investigation that began with a review of county restaurant inspections for the last two years. It’s hard to imagine a more valid--or powerful--use of a secret lens in telling a story, one that would be infinitely less credible and effective without such pictures.

Among Monday night’s targets was Canter’s, for half a century a Los Angeles landmark where, said Grover, a Channel 2 researcher with a hidden camera worked undercover as an employee to obtain video evidence of why, according to the report, the restaurant had badly failed its last two health inspections. The visuals were jolting.

On the screen, as described by Grover, were “raw turkeys left out unrefrigerated for up to nine hours” and “garbage piled six feet high, garbage that attracts hungry cockroaches that we catch crawling around boxes of food.” And around bags of flour are “hundreds of rat droppings. . . .”

Grover also named Le Petit Bistro, Acapulco, Norms and Revival Cafe as being among the “thousands of places failing their inspections that haven’t been shut down.”

Secret footage that Grover said was shot inside Revival Cafe showed kitchen workers appearing to eat on the job. And Grover noted the worker on the screen who “while making a salad . . . licks the dressing off his fingers. He never washes his hands, and then he just scoops that salad onto a plate and sends it out to a customer.” And in the pantry, said the reporter, describing pictures on the screen, was food “so spoiled, it fell apart when we touched it.”

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Also taking a big hit from Channel 2 was the Monterey Park restaurant Ocean Star, a favorite of food critics, which, Grover said, the health department closed for just a day and ordered a cleanup after “21 people reported getting sick two months ago.” A month later, Channel 2 went undercover there, obtaining Monday night’s video showing meat that Grover said had been “sitting for hours in its own blood and juices,” and shellfish “left out of the fridge for hours, the same violations that cause food poisoning.” Identified as Ocean Park employees, moreover, were men seen smoking while preparing food in the kitchen, with an ash falling from one of the cigarettes “onto a cutting board where he is preparing fish.”

Grover said Canter’s, Revival Cafe and Ocean Star declined to comment. He did speak in the piece to Joe Nash, the county health department official who, he said, supervised its restaurant inspections. Yet on the screen, at least, Nash was unable to explain satisfactorily why so many allegedly unclean eating establishments were allowed by the county to remain open.

This tough Channel 2 reporting was accompanied by the station’s obligatory hype (“The investigation of the decade”) that’s reflected in its oft-run promo showing its investigative “I-Team,” led by anchor Ann Martin, resolutely marching in close formation on a puddle-filled street at night.

And there were flaws Monday. A man seeking to address a described shortage of county health inspectors was not identified. And displaying a list of the “2,000 dirtiest restaurants in town” that he said shortly would appear on the station’s Web page, Grover promised to “reveal more of the places that made this list Tuesday night . . . from well-known chain restaurants to some fancy restaurants.” If the purpose was public safety, though, instead of titillatingly withholding names to make sure viewers keep watching, Channel 2 should have disclosed as many as possible immediately.

And, of course, anchors will be anchors. “When there’s this kind of lax enforcement,” anchor Michael Tuck told Grover on the news set, “it makes you wonder if somebody’s taking money under the table. I know we have no evidence of that, but it does make you wonder.” To which Grover replied: “You hear the rumors.” To which Tuck replied: “You do.”

You’d hope that these were merely careless ad-libs instead of scripted lines designed to spread rumors and cast aspersions without citing evidence.

Well, Upton Sinclairs they’re not. Yet the message sent to unsafe restaurants by the “investigation of the decade” is clear and mighty: If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.