Abstract:
Investigative journalists sometimes resort to the use of fake
identities in order to reveal fakes and malpractice, a phenomenon
that can be described as revelatory fakery. Acclaimed
investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw, in collaboration with BBC
Africa Eye, employs revelatory fakery to expose and prosecute
wrongdoers in Ghana. From an ethical viewpoint, Anas’s
revelatory fakery, a second order fakery, becomes a seedbed for
an exponential level of fakery. This article poses the question
whether Anas’s work is journalism or instead yet another
expression of fakery that allows a prosecutor to act as a
journalist. This question is contextualised within the ethics of the
broader narratives created by the BBC Africa Eye investigations,
which feed and promote a spectacular but “fake” narrative about
Africa as a place of negatives, difference, and darkness
