Is undercover journalism dead?

For decades, the major investigative units of the world's leading broadcasters made infiltration their sharpest weapon. Their hidden cameras produced evidence of corruption and abuse that could not have been obtained any other way. Today, though, the undercover method is in deep crisis. Some specialist teams have given up on proper infiltration, settling for more cautious versions that cost less and carry less risk, or dropping the method altogether. The drift may also be a consequence of major publishers disinvesting from a practice that is expensive, slow, and increasingly contested in the courts. The most solid exception is BBC Eye, the unit specialising in investigations across the Global South and Eastern Europe, where local journalists routinely infiltrate networks of abuse, trafficking and propaganda that no overt camera could ever get near. Why does the method hold there and not elsewhere? What is lost when journalism gives up the only tool capable of documenting what power is determined to deny? A conversation between those who have practised the method, those who have abandoned it, and those who still use it, to work out whether undercover has a future.