ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reasons, practices, and ethics of entrapment journalism. It describes what entrapment journalism is and point to its early roots in law-enforcement. The chapter also discusses the gamut of strategies employed by reporters, ranging from attempts to induce a source to commit a transgression or misrepresentation of their own identity to more mitigated “betrayal” strategies, such as exposing off-record information. It presents an emic and etic perspectives on entrapment journalism, namely, how journalists and scholars respectively perceive the practices of deception and trust violation, discussing scholarly debate on ethical issues surrounding entrapment. The chapter explains several future directions for the practice and study of entrapment journalism. In the field of journalism, entrapment is linked to contemporary trends of active newsgathering and to the emergent genre of “crime-busting journalism”. Professional disputes over the practice of entrapment are mirrored in the debates among scholars of applied moral philosophy and journalism ethics.
