Survivor, Diplomacy, Metagaming? (spoilers)

I couldn't resist, I found the most recent episode of survivor to be fairly
interesting.

Brief summary:  One of the players (Jon) knows that a family member is
always allowed to visit.  In advance he makes a plan for the family member
to give him some bad news... his grandma died.  Its a lie, his grandmother
is in fact alive.  He uses the sympathy garnered from this lie to win the
reward challenge and, more importantly, to sway the vote at tribal council
to save his ally.

In Diplomacy, a similar tactic would be to claim that you had just lost your
job/wife/father in real life (during a gunboat game) and hope to gain some
leverage inside the game.  Eg. "Sorry I have been so uncommunicative lately,
I just lost my job and times are hard.  Just tell me what needs to be done
and I'll help you".

Obviously, for this to work in diplomacy, you need to have built up a prior
relationship until the point where it would be reasonable for you to divulge
this type of "news".

So, my question is, is this an acceptable behavior in Diplomacy?  Offhand,
in the survivor show, I have no problems with what Jon did, he thought ahead
and made a good plan.  Similarly, if someone wants to claim that their wife
just got killed to help them in a diplomacy game, I'm not sure if I have a
problem with that either, but I'm curious as to what other people think...

David Hertzman