public interest

Going undercover involves deception and intrusion as tools of public interest journalism, and to justify this there needs to be sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Chilukuri Paramathama, who runs a pharmacy in Nalgonda city in the southern Indian state of Telangana, told the BBC that in 2014, he filed a public interest petition in the high court in Hyderabad after reading news reports about a three-year-old who had died in Noida city after she was administered a wrong injection for fever.

There was judged to be a significant public interest in evidence-gathering of this nature.

Specialist prosecutor Andrew Pritchard, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: "I have decided that there is sufficient evidence to bring the case to trial and that it is in the public interest to pursue criminal proceedings."

“Your agency’s mission is to serve the public interest, not to act as an enforcement arm for political retribution against media outlets that displease those in power.”