Media Focus: Celebrating whistleblowers

BY shubha singh| IN Media Practice | 03/12/2002

Shubha Singh

Time magazine’s year-end cover carries the pictures of three women who shook the American establishment in the past year. Its persons of the year are Cynthia Cooper, Sheron Watkins and Coleen Rowley who "took huge personal risks to blow the whistle on what went wrong at WorldCom, Enron and the FBI", according to the magazine. The ensuing scandals engulfed corporate America and its accounting procedures as well as the intelligence agency.

Coleen Rowley was the Federal Bureau of Investigation staff attorney who wrote an internal office memo to the FBI director, Robert Mueller reporting that the FBI had ignored pleas from her field office that Zacharias Moussaoui be investigated. Moussaoui, a Franco-Moroccan who spoke poor English, had signed up to learn to fly a 747 aircraft at a local flying school. He was later indicted as a co-conspirator in the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Centre in New York. Sheron Watkins, Vice President at Enron wrote a letter to Enron Chairman, Kenneth Lay questioning the company’s accounting methods and warning of "an elaborate accounting hoax". Cynthia Cooper, a senior vice president of internal audit at WorldCom informed the board that the company had covered up losses of US $3.8 billion through phoney book-keeping. The bubble of accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom finally led to the questioning of corporate America’s unethical practices.

The term whistleblowers evokes an image of troublesome, cranky misfits with a personal agenda. But the three women tried to use existing company channels to initiate corrective action; it was only when their memos were leaked that the subjects became public. Governments and large corporate bodies have the tendency to whitewash uncomfortable facts, even if it means covering up large misdeeds, and allowing them to continue, in order to save embarrassing disclosures. It takes courage and perseverance to go against the norm. All three women faced tremendous odds at their work places; each of them risked their jobs, their health, their privacy, and their sanity to go ahead with what they though was right.

News media around the world also tends to carry look-alike and think-alike journalism in its newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Such journalism is easy, doesn’t require using critical facilities or making the effort of looking under the surface to seek an alternative perspective. There have been few critical voices in western media on the rush to war in Iraq. But Danny Schechter, an executive editor of Mediachannel.org, has drawn a list of names of several journalists and mediapersons, who have turned away from accepted and acceptable ways of seeing things. They are whistle-blowers within the media, bucking the demand that the Fourth Estate fall in line.

In his list is Paul Robinson of the conservative Spectator magazine. Robinson recently wrote that there existed no legitimate reason to wage or threaten war against Iraq. "Saddam Hussein poses no threat to us. As recently as ten years ago, it is unlikely that any British government would have considered taking military action unless there was a genuine threat to our national security. Today we are reduced to twitching over fantastic delusions of enormous enemy capabilities and make-believe scenarios of future holocausts, and Tony Blair can drive us inexorably towards an unnecessary and quite unjust war.

Journalists James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot of the Glasgow Sunday Herald scooped the rest of the world media on the extent of Washington`s interception of Iraq`s weapons declaration before other UN members could even see it. They discovered that "the United States edited out more than 8,000 crucial pages of Iraq`s 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitized version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council."

Scottish filmmaker Jamie Doran`s film "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death" created a stir in Europe last year over an alleged massacre of Taliban prisoners of war. Before the film was screened over German TV, Doran said, "witnesses saw U.S. special forces stand by and watch as Northern Alliance allies murdered Taliban POWs." BBC covered aspects of this story at the time but American TV outlets ignored the story as they focused on the death of a CIA agent during the Mazar-e-Sharif prison revolt. They ignored well-documented charges of human rights abuses at the time, he said.

Seymour Hersh, now writing for the New Yorker, said in a recent interview that the Bush Administration is the hardest to get access to: "Oh, it`s much harder. There`s almost a ferocious animosity toward people in the press who ask questions they don`t want to hear. And this is a government that has tremendous influence over cable television, over radio talk. They really don`t need the New York Times, or The New Yorker, or the Washington Post to get their message out, so it`s very hard slugging. This Administration is tough. It`s a very punitive crowd, and anyone who steps over the line gets into trouble."

According to Schechter, these disparate voices, some of the right, and others of the left were united in their willingness to probe below the surface layers of the conventional wisdom and the official story to take a more critical approach in terms of the questions asked and information offered.

Contact: shub@vsnl.com