‘Entrapment journalism’ is pushing the limits

England national football team manager Sam Allardyce is not the first and definitely will not be the last to have been crushed by “entrapment journalism”. Having been in his dream job for just over two months, he had to bow out in disgrace this week after reporters disguising themselves as foreign investors exposed him as a cunning man who knew how to skirt his employer’s rules. Some say he had it coming, and laud the sting, but others suspect that a journalistic line might have been crossed.

Speaking about England’s ban on third-party ownership of football players, Allardyce suggested he knew how to find loopholes and deal with the “problem”. He did speak out against bribery, but the journalists who recorded the conversation did not play up his remarks on the subject. The man had to promptly leave his job once the recording became public and make an embarrassing apology to his country’s Football Association.

Entrapment is often controversial even when carried out by law enforcers. When journalists do it, questions, suspicion and sympathy for those subjected to the practice abound. Allardyce could have just been trying to please his seemingly elegant “visitors”. Was he simply being the gossipy, occasionally foul-mouthed employee that so many of us have been? How could the journalists be sure their foreknowledge was accurate enough that they could be fair to the man whose career they might be about to torpedo?

Even without entrapment, reporters are often accused of trying to play God. The argument for their intrusiveness is that they know more inside details about the story and have access to information other people don’t know about. The argument against an over-intrusive role is that reporters themselves are human.

The UK-based Independent Press Standards Organisation has said journalists could resort to entrapment “only when they have a public-interest justification for doing so and there are no other means of gathering the required information”. Apparently that’s a guideline for exposing serious crimes when no other methodology would work. If entrapment is used to attack a man’s integrity when no actual wrongdoing has occurred, the practice becomes more questionable. Allardyce, say his sympathisers, could have been roped into a situation that might otherwise never happen during his career.

Entrapment journalism is controversial in essence, because it’s the editors who must give their reporters the green light to pursue it, and it’s the editors who must judge whether the issue at hand really warrants the technique. It must also be kept in mind that, while everyone has a dark side, it might never become apparent unless there is severe temptation.

The thin line is obvious. On the one hand, journalists have a duty to expose shortcomings in public figures. On the other hand, they are not judges and are not equipped with the legal expertise to nail down their subjects’ perceived failures. The controversy is more glaring now with the social media’s increasing influence. Entrapped subjects are judged and sentenced online before they even set foot in court.

Allardyce now bears the burden of defending his words and actions, but so do the reporters who exposed him. Perhaps they’re underlining the importance of integrity in his job, but the issue is not just what kind of man the manager of the England football team should be. 

With digital technology making it so much easier for reporters to mount stings, the issue is how much farther the use of entrapment should go – and whether it should have gone this far in the first place.