Shoot the Messenger; Bury the Evidence
The life of the whistleblower has proved to be an especially difficult one. Sadly, whilst their actions are essential to revealing and ultimately fixing a bad situation for stakeholders – all of whom are negatively impacted by the situation in question – they are pilloried. Even in a situation so damaging, so frightening, where people’s lives are at risk, most organisations tend to maintain a “shoot the messenger” Modus Operandi.
They do this in the interest of protecting the reputation of the organisation, often attacking that of the individual who dared to speak out against them. At what point, I wonder, will management realise that this strategy is ill-conceived and guaranteed to wreak more damage, further afield and longer term?
Nowhere more so does this occur than in the public service, where many departments have a code of conduct that prohibits the leaking of information about the activities of the department.
Jayant Patel, notorious now as Dr Death, came from the United States in 2003 to Australia to practice in Bundaberg, a small rural township with an aging population. As the rates of infection, complications, corrective surgeries and deaths mounted to alarming levels at his hands, a lone courageous nurse stepped up to take on a system that had others cowed under the threat of job loss.
Supported by a local politician not in the government of the day, Toni Hoffman began to secretly reveal the blunders of process and dangerous obfuscations to an award-winning journalist. An increasingly worried public followed the story in the newspapers.
The Queensland Health Department tried ever harder to bury the story, and the suspected whistleblower.
The culture of concealment within the health department meant that Patel’s incompetence went unchallenged. He was in fact lauded and protected by a system that rewarded throughput performance rather than patient care, and life.
The journalist, Hedley Thomas, went on to write a book called Sick to Death. In it, he throws the covers off a health system in crisis, and an apparently manipulative fraudster with an almost psychopathic need to operate. But more than that, he exposes the folly of the department’s – indeed the government’s – conspiracy of cover up.
At the time the story was gaining traction in the media and pressure was being brought to bear on the Health Minister, Gordon Nuttall, and department chief, Steve Buckland, they ramped up their intimidation tactics. On a rare visit to the hospital they berated horrified nursing staff. As Hedley tells it:
When Nuttall stepped aside and Buckland took the floor, the Director-General went further, forcefully lecturing the staff about the damage they had done to the hospital and to the reputation of Queensland Health and Patel. As a result of the leak, Buckland fulminated, the staff had completely screwed everything up. “No decent doctor would want to come to Bundaberg to work in these circumstances,” he said.
To hell with the dead and dying patients and their families. Shoot the messenger. Bury the evidence.
On January 3rd, 2009, the Washington Times told the story of Peter Nesbitt, an air traffic controller of 20 years in the United States. Mr Nesbitt complained he was retaliated against by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers after he raised safety concerns with the National Transportation Safety Board and Congress, and filed a report to a confidential aviation safety reporting database maintained by NASA. He was removed from air traffic control duties, assigned to office work and ordered to take part in a remedial training program for controllers.
Shoot the messenger. Bury the evidence.
In September 2008, the special counsel’s office sent letters to Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters saying the FAA didn’t adequately respond to complaints from Mr. Nesbitt and other air traffic controllers about the potential for collisions involving planes taking off and landing on runways with intersecting flight paths at airports in Memphis and Newark, N.J.
There is a “substantial likelihood” that conditions at the two airports “create a substantial and specific danger to public safety,” the letters said. The special counsel’s office also requested that the Transportation Department’s inspector general investigate the safety accusations.
Dr Gerard McLaren, a specialist neurologist and former director of rehabilitation and aged care services at the Canberra Hospital, Australia, blew the whistle on a the hospital’s former head of neurosurgery, Dr Raymond Newcombe, in 1995.
Speaking about his experience for the first time to ABC TV’s Four Corners program August 27th, 2007, he says he was ostracised by colleagues, attempted suicide and to this day remains at home on leave.
“I’ve reached the point where I’ve now crossed the line,” he said.
“I’m seen as a filthy rat because I’ve actually joined the cause of the patients… You can’t actually be part of the doctor party and the patient party – you’re in one camp or the other.”
It’s us and them, and their job to serve us is superseded by their need to shoot the messenger; bury the evidence.
In Britain, the body of Dr. David Kelly was found on July 18th, 2003. A Ministry of Defence microbiologist and former senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq, told several journalists that he thought the intelligence material concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was being misused. Dr Kelly became the subject of a government campaign to expose the whistleblower’s identity. He was named and then forced to testify at two parliamentary inquiries into whether the government had lied in its intelligence dossiers of September 2002 and February 2003.
Kelly testified in public to the Foreign Affairs Committee on July 15 and in private to the Intelligence and Security Committee on July 16. He disappeared on July 17, 2003.
Writing in The Daily Mail, Britain, October 18th 2007, Fiona Barton reported “politician, Norman Baker, believes Dr Kelly, who exposed the Government’s ’sexed-up’ Iraq dossier, was killed to stop him making further revelations about the lies that took Britain to war.”
Baker is not alone. The public is now very familiar with the culture of concealment, and the public service MO: Shoot the messenger; bury the evidence.
See more on this last and still unfolding story here: The Independent, The Insider.
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Category: Reputation Management, Sin & Spin
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