CRAWFORD GRIFFIN - Never Stay Silent

The United States has a longer tradition of protecting whistleblowers than most Americans realize. As legal scholar Ruth Ann Strickland notes in the First Amendment Encyclopedia , roughly forty federal laws have been passed to shield employees who expose government and corporate wrongdoing, a legislative history that stretches back to the Revolutionary War itself. Yet despite this deep institutional commitment, the government has repeatedly prosecuted the very people these laws were meant to protect, turning a wartime espionage statute into one of the most powerful tools for silencing dissent in American history. The Continental Congress In 1778, the Continental Congress passed what scholars consider the world's first whistleblower protection law, after naval officers Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven exposed their commanding officer, Commodore Esek Hopkins, for torturing British prisoners of war. Congress not only vindicated the officers but also paid for their legal fees. The princi...

Mervyn LeRoy's 1931 film Five Star Final is nominally a story about a New York tabloid, but anyone who has sat through one of our journalism history lectures will recognize it as something larger: a condensed case study in how American newspapers got themselves into the ethical mess they keep trying to climb out of. The Gazette, the fictional paper at the center of the film, is stalling. Its managing editor, Joseph Randall, and its publisher, Mr. Hinchcliffe, decide to revive a twenty-year-old scandal, Nancy Voorhees's long-buried murder case, not because it is news, but because it will move papers.   The Shadow of the Penny Press and Yellow Journalism The Gazette is a direct descendant of everything we learned about. The Penny Press Era of the 1830s established two ideas that never really left the industry: that newspapers could operate independently of political patronage, and that large circulation was the business model. That second idea, "to sell more no matter the co...