Journalism’s impact, reporters’ roles as watchdogs and their commitment to uncover corporate or governmental wrongdoing often relies on informants who decide to risk their careers and reputations, at times their lives, to bring to light their employers’ malfeasance. The first whistleblower protection law was signed in the United States in 1778. It was intended to shield government employees from retaliation. Yet whistleblowers often turn first to the news media. This leap of faith implies a level of trust in journalists’ adherence to normative roles as monitors, vital to the functioning of democracy, who protect their sources at all cost (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2010).
As the confidence in legislation and structures designed to safeguard whistleblowers has waned (e.g., Eide & Kunelius, 2018; Kenny, 2018; Thorsen, 2016), the journalist-whistleblower relationship is evolving. Digital collection and dissemination of data on one hand and the possibilities of surveillance on the other, play a large role in shaping trust in journalists as recipients of secret information. Yet how have whistleblowers perceived their counterparts in the news media?
This study aims to understand how trust in the news media among whistleblowers has changed over time. Through in depth interviews with 12 – 15 whistleblowers in the United States and in Europe who contacted and worked with reporters to tell their stories from the 1960s until present, this paper examines their perceptions of the news media in general and the journalists they confided in, in particular and how, if at all, in has evolved.
Some of the expected findings are that “historical” whistleblowers who were active during the 1960s and 1970s selected the journalists they wanted to confide in based on news the reporters' perceived adherence to normative journalistic values that centered around defending democracy and protecting civil society, whereas more recent whistleblowers select journalists that they trust to protect their identity. This work is a novel contribution to work that has focused on the journalists’ perspective in the reporter-whistleblower relationship (e.g., Carlson, 2011; Dunkle-Polier, 2019; Posetti, 2017), by adding historical and current perspectives of whistleblowers themselves.
References
Carlson, M. (2011). On the condition of anonymity: Unnamed sources and the battle for journalism: University of Illinois Press.
Christians, C. G., Glasser, T., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K., & White, R. A. (2010). Normative theories of the media: Journalism in democratic societies: University of Illinois Press.
Dunkle-Polier, E. D. (2019). Shielding the' Enemy of the People': Protecting the Reporter's Privilege in the Age of Social Media. Boston College Law Review, 60(8), 2581.
Eide, E., & Kunelius, R. (2018). Whistleblowers and journalistic ideals: Surveillance, Snowden and the meta-coverage of journalism. Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook, 16(1), 75-95.
Kenny, K. (2018). Censored: Whistleblowers and impossible speech. Human Relations, 71(8), 1025-1048.
Posetti, J. (2017). Protecting journalism sources in the digital age: UNESCO Publishing.
Thorsen, E. (2016). Whistleblowing in a digital age: Journalism after Manning and Snowden The Routledge companion to digital journalism studies (pp. 568-578): Routledge.