Louis Clark is constantly searching for whistleblowers in need of representation.

“Whistleblowers tend to be the hardest working employees, and tend to have the highest standards,” said Clark, the president of the Government Accountability Project.

Most whistleblowers, he said, are, “exactly the kind of employees that employers want.”

For the second straight year, Syracuse University partnered with the GAP to present “The Whistleblower, The Press and The Truth” on Wednesday night in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium. The event was moderated by Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at SU.

The event was a three-person panel discussion on whistleblowers and the importance the press plays in relaying their stories. Panelists included Clark, Thomas Tamm, a Department of Justice whistleblower, and Kristina Borjesson, an award-winning investigative journalist.

Tamm worked for the Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration and took part in illegal wiretaps on people in the United States. In order to perform these wiretaps, the department needed warrants and Tamm soon realized they were bypassing this necessity. He approached reporters from The New York Times, who eventually published his story.

Borjesson investigated the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 and faced extreme pressure from government officials to drop her story. She persisted and ended up losing consecutive jobs at CBS and ABC.

Borjesson was eventually able to release her findings, countering the official reports that had been disseminated by media outlets for years. Officials contended that the plane exploded due to mechanical failure, despite eyewitnesses claiming a missile struck the Boeing 747.

“It was one of those moments where the physical evidence met the virtual reality created by all these reports in the past, and it was a big moment for me,” Borjesson said.

The panel went on to discuss the difficulties whistleblowers and journalists both face when they expose stories like this. Borjesson said she felt she became a pariah in the media and Tamm said he felt “very isolated” at times and even had his house raided by FBI agents without having committed a crime.

Tamm said he found it increasingly difficult to find a job.

“Apparently, I was just too controversial to get a call back,” Tamm said.

The idea of whistleblowers using journalists willing to tell their story was stressed throughout the discussion. Tamm said he reached out to specific journalists because he had been impressed with their previous work.

Clark added that this is common among whistleblowers that, he said, have no other outlet to tell the truth.

The panelists helped educate the audience on what the press can and can’t do when the government actively misleads it. For example, Borjesson said the Bush administration “came down like handcuffs on the press” in the lead up to the Iraq War.

“I think tonight served as a strong reminder of the importance of the freedom of the press,” said Scott MacFarlane, an SU alumnus and an investigative reporter, who attended the event. “If you really look at what happens to whistleblowers in the government that try to work through the system, it’s not pretty.”

Published on April 1, 2015 at 11:04 pm

Contact Joe: jpleonar@syr.edu