Yesterday, a whistleblower alleged that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was performing hysterectomies on Spanish-speaking women without their consent, and many didn’t even know what had happened.
A whistleblower who previously worked at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia detailed a high rate of hysterectomies and alleged medical neglect in a complaint filed to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general Monday.
Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse employed by the center who's represented by the Government Accountability Project and Project South, stated in a complaint that while some women may have required a hysterectomy, "everybody's uterus cannot be that bad."
This is a huge story, and as outlets from CNN to NY Mag to The Daily Beast to Vice ran their version of the account, activists and media watchers question why it’s not an above-the-fold, front page story in our national press.
The answer is simple, but also complex: reporting takes time, and for a story like this, news organizations need to report, investigate, and corroborate beyond solely writing about the whistleblower’s account.
One thing that has become an odd truism in the Trump Era: if a news organization doesn’t run a splashy headline on the front page, then it’s not considered a serious story. Obviously, this is wrong.
For example, the Washington Post did cover this allegation, requesting comment from ICE and when it didn’t get it, ran what ICE provided to the A.P.
ICE didn’t immediately return a message from The Washington Post about the claims. ICE declined to comment in detail on the complaint to the Associated Press, but cast doubt about its use of anonymous testimony from detainees and former detainees to bolster Wooten’s allegations.
“In general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve,” the agency said in a statement to the Associated Press.
But I am sure that the Post, along with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other outlets have reporters on the story, digging into this newest whistleblower account.
And here’s the thing: we are in the age of the whistleblower. Much has been written about the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers, where the administration prosecuted 8 whistleblowers charged for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, more than all the previous administrations combined.
Mother Jones reported in August that
The danger extends far beyond the well-known names most people associate with whistleblowing, the civil servants who sounded the alarm on large matters of national security—the Ukraine whistleblower, National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted during the Obama administration, or Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of pages of classified NSA documents. The reality is that most whistleblowing is far more quotidian, often pertaining to small-scale good governance that doesn’t make headlines. Between 2014 and 2018, more than 14,000 federal employees filed whistleblower disclosures or retaliation complaints, according to data compiled by the Government Accountability Office.
This last week alone has seen two big whistleblower accounts: the aforementioned ICE hysterectomy and a Department of Homeland Security official who said he was told to stop giving intelligence briefings about the threat of Russian interference in the upcoming election because, in part, it “made the President look bad,”
We’re also seeing corporate whistleblowers stand up for what they believe is the right thing to do.
Yesterday, BuzzFeed dropped a story about a former Facebook engineer who wrote a 6,600-word memo saying
Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
(Interestingly, while news orgs like the NYT haven’t written about the ICE whistleblower, they have covered BuzzFeed’s reporting: It takes the NYT 9 paragraphs to say BuzzFeed reported on this earlier. The argument I can see: The NYT corroborated BuzzFeed’s reporting, so felt confident to pull the trigger on the piece.)
And in media, we’re seeing journalists begin to speak up about the inequities of their newsroom and occupation; not whistleblowing, per se, but something that, for a small industry, speaks quite loudly.
As media organizations recruit, hearing people say how their former newsrooms are bad will have an impact. Why would you want to work for an organization that doesn’t value you? Many sign documents when they leave, so they can’t publicly say what they know about how poorly a newsroom is run or how HR departments sweep damning allegations under the rug. But whisper networks in this industry are becoming louder.
Democracy dies in darkness, we’re told. But whistleblowers, standing up for what they believe is right, whether in government, corporate America or a newsroom, shine a much-needed light on gross injustices. In the Trump Era, these injustices and the number of whistleblowers, it seems, have become the norm.
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Arkells, “Whistleblower”
Some interesting links:
For the media-curious:
Who’s interested in “slow journalism”? Turns out, mostly the same people who are into regular ol’ fast journalism (Nieman Lab)
For Halloween marketers:
Hershey Maps Trick-or-Treating Risks in Hopes Coronavirus Won’t Scare Off Halloween Sales (WSJ)
For platforms:
How ByteDance's CEO balked at selling TikTok's U.S. business (Reuters)
The Technology 202: Google returns to the hot seat on antitrust as Justice Department case looms (WaPo)
For streaming:
CBS All Access Will Rebrand as Paramount+ Next Year (Adweek)
For influencers:
Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?(NY Mag)
For media criticism:
Trump Made a Bad Bargain With Woodward (The Atlantic)
For long-reads:
He Hunted Bin Laden for CIA. Now He Wants Americans Dead. (The Daily Beast)