Award winning local Los Angeles TV investigative personality Joel Grover, set to receive another national IRE (www.ire.org) award this weekend for a piece on contaminated water in public schools last year, has used some highly questionable tactics in his efforts to extract confessions from the subjects of his infamous hidden-camera stories.
Here, while reporting for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, Grover confronts an L.A. County Health Dept. restaurant inspector he allegedly caught taking a bribe in 1999, Grover threatens to call the police if the inspector won't talk to him, and later lies about recording the inspector on camera. The entire confrontation was caught by Grover's hidden cameras.
In, “Grade A Bribery,” Grover tells viewers his hidden cameras have caught the inspector taking a cash payoff from a restaurant owner, in order to boost the restaurant's cleanliness letter-grade rating, from a, “B,” to an, “A.”
Grover presents hidden-camera video that shows the restaurant owner counting out cash and handing it to the inspector – but what he doesn't tell viewers – is that Grover supplied the money and scripted the exchange between the inspector and the owner, according to a Los Angeles County District Attorney investigator's tape-recorded interview with the owner, obtained by The Enterprise Report.
The Enterprise Report will have more on this story next week.
