The awards season is nearly upon us and with it the thrill and promise of those deserving, or otherwise, being recognised for outstanding contributions and $600k dresses. Never to be ones to miss out on a good party, we at Expolink have compiled our own whistleblowing awards.
While by no means an exhaustible list we have gone some way to honouring (and dishonouring) some of the folks who make the world of whistleblowing a more interesting place.
At 15, Enron was just a teenager when, as US’s seventh largest company, it employed 21,000 staff in 40 countries. This success, it transpired, was based on a premise of false accounting and fraud. Sherron Watkins, VP of Corporate Development at Enron was the first on the scene, alerting CEO Kenneth Lay to other whistleblowers and the seismic holes in the company reports. Critics say that Watkins’ actions don’t necessarily constitute whistleblowing as she simply gave her boss a nifty escape route from the impending meltdown – either way, she went on to become one of Times People of the Year, 2002, alongside two other whistleblowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Coleen Rowley of the FBI.
Among Enron’s dubious accolades of largest audit failure and bankruptcy re-organisation in US history at that time, the play by Lucy Prebble, based on the scandal won a plethora of international awards – so, worked out well for some.
Manning was arrested in May 2010 and charged two months later for supplying an estimated 250,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks which were duly republished by several left-leaning papers and on the Wikileaks website. An acquaintance, Adrian Lano, subsequently blew the whistle on Manning, proving that one good turn deserves another. It is unclear whether Manning had any kind of personal relationship with Wikileaks high priest Julian Assange, but his organisation has been vocal in support of Manning’s actions saying he has “single-handedly changed hundreds of thousands of people’s lives for the better.” Conversely, the White House branded his actions as “terrorism”. Assange for his part is embroiled in a legal battle of his own for alleged sexual assault -
Manning’s trial continues…
It seems a little unfair to award one of these prized trinkets to an established actor, but back in July 2011 we were thrilled to discover that Grant had enjoyed a chance encounter with News of the World reporter Paul McMullan and secretly taped admissions of wide-spread phone hacking at the paper. Grant went on to charm all at the Levenson Enquiry and despite being branded as a “screechy, sanctimonious little (bleep)” by the not-at-all screechy Piers Morgan, seems to be enjoying some nice, credible PR and perhaps a little more peace from the press.
Jeffrey Wigand’s whistleblowing endeavours were immortalised in the Russell Crowe vehicle, The Insider. Whilst working at a large tobacco manufacturer Wigand discovered his bosses were manipulating their product blend to increase its addictive capacity. Wigand told all on the US TV show, 60 Minutes, and his employers responded with a law suit to prevent him testifying in open court. The company and others of its ilk were left fuming (ahem) when various states began their own litigations to recoup losses to public health initiatives caused by tobacco-related illness.
See also: Linda Tripp of Clinton/Lewinsky fame. More of a sticky beak than a whistleblower, but makes this list for inciting a hugely divisive argument regarding her motivations for revealing details about the affair. The movie deal it is claimed she was anticipating for her part in the scandal is yet to materialise…
Mark Felt, the whistleblower and former FBI agent was the infamous informant of Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whom together brought down the Nixon administration. Bernstein and Woodward published a series of articles on the Watergate scandal revealing corrupt activity in the Nixon stable, later a book and inevitably a film, All The President’s Men. Felt’s disclosures lead to Nixon’s resignation and jail sentences for a number of senior White House employees. Felt went by the codename ‘Deep Throat’ and enjoyed anonymity until 2005 when he confessed all in an interview with Vanity Fair, 31 years after Nixon’s resignation.
It is not always the high profile cases that have, or should have, the most enduring legacy. ‘Though Leslie Chapman was well known throughout Britain in the ‘70s, regrettably he is little remembered to this day. As a government employee he took the exceptional step of breaking Civil Service convention, if not the Official Secrets Act, and speaking out through a series of books about waste and extravagance in the British Civil Service. He then broadened his area of concern to local government and nationalised industry and, despite undoubtedly, putting a few noses out of joint along the way, he was deliberately placed on the board of London Transport as a result of his first book of revelation, tasked with rooting out abuses there. The recent raft of MP expenses scandals shows that such activities are still rife, making it all the more unfortunate that Chapman’s legacy is not secured in our national and political psyche and that decent governance systems have not always prevailed.
