Word: wallraff
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When Günter Wallraff sprayed his face with dark paint and put on a black curly wig and dark contact lenses, he discovered how it felt to be black in Germany today. Sometimes he was subjected to thinly disguised or casual racism. Other times people were openly hostile to him. On one occasion, he even felt threatened...
...Wallraff, who filmed his experiences as a black man as part of a new documentary, Black on White, has made a career of this sort of daring, investigative reporting. In his 40 years as a journalist, he has worked undercover at a tabloid newspaper, industrial plants and fast-food chains to expose the conditions the employees faced. In the 1980s, he posed for two years as a Turkish "guest worker" and wrote a best-selling book revealing shocking examples of discrimination and exploitation. But Wallraff's latest project may be his most controversial yet. His attempt to address racism...
...some language purists insist that there is value to the top-down rules of English. "People who spell a lot of words incorrectly either aren't paying attention or don't care," says Barbara Wallraff, who writes the Wordcourt column on language and writing problems for the Atlantic and King Features Syndicate. "Why are we changing our language to accommodate - with two m's - them...
...WALLRAFF'S TECHINIQUE to be dismissed so lightly as Bradlee suggests? One advantage of Wallraff's method has emerged with the current controversy over Woodward and Armstrong's book The Brethren, where to prevent the betrayal of confidential sources, their evidence is unverified and must be taken on faith. Because Wallraff's sources act involuntarily, there is no need to protect them, and he can thus offer full disclosure of sources and documentation of his evidence...
Nevertheless, there remains a defect, particular to Wallraff's method, that mars his objectivity. Teleological journalism--reporting with a singular goal, like the doctrinaire Marxism Wallraff's professes--blinds the investigator to other, equally important truths. This prejudice makes The Undesriable Journalist an uneven collection. Some of the narratives read like adventure novels; others, fraught with details of worker mistreatment in factories, sound like chapters taken from The Condition of the Working Class in England. No matter how scientifically he records his results with microphones, magnetic tapes and hidden cameras if Wallraff seeks only part of the truth, that...