Whistle-blowing in Modern Politics
Introduction-What is Whistleblowing and how is it categorized?
The term “whistle-blower” is a combination of two words - “Whistle” and “Blower”. It refers to a person who blows the whistle (or brings the attention) like an umpire, a referee or a traffic policeman to indicate foul play, illegal or dishonest behaviour, wrongdoing, misconduct, corruption, fraud etc. Whistleblower is someone willing to expose secrets. Ralph Nader coined the word in 1970s by his book “Whistle blowing” in order to avoid connection with negative words like “informers” and “snitches”. A non-exhaustive list of Whistleblowers on Wikipedia contains more than 200 whistleblowers and also shows that Whistleblowing started as early as in
…show more content…
On basis of these set of people, Whistleblowing is classified in 3 broad areas as follows-
Internal Whistleblowing: Whistle-blowing within a company is referred to as internal whistleblowing. Here, the accusations are brought up in attention to the company employees and other people within the company.
External Whistleblowing: Whistle-blowing outside a company to lawyers, the media, watchdog agencies, other agencies is termed as External Whistleblowing.
Third Party Whistleblowing: In third party whistleblowing the identity of the Whistleblower is kept confidential and not revealed. External organizations like Wikileaks is revealing secrets without informing about the sources and keeping the identity of the whistleblower concealed.
On the basis of the organization whistle-blown on, whistleblowing is classified as