Whistleblowers And PR People

How should PR departments handle internal whistleblowers, reporting wrong doing by the company they work for?

The question arises after the death of John Barnett, who exposed safety concerns at Boeing several years before it turned out he was completely right.

Barnett was found dead in a parking lot last week, days after giving evidence against Boeing in a lawsuit.

The coroner’s office said he died from a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound.

This is all awful, but it is just about possible to imagine the strain Barnett was under.

Sherron Watkins, the whistleblower who first spoke out about Enron’s fraudulent accounting practices, would know

She tells Ragan’s PR Daily: “I’ve certainly met a lot of people with whistleblowing experience and the actions against a whistleblower are very, very predictable. Enron was attempting to do all those things to me, but they imploded too fast so my period of suffering the same fate as most whistleblowers was shorter.”

What’s the head of PR to do in such circumstances? Sadly, it seems, too often they attack the messenger, however they may personally feel.

Watkins says: “That was happening to me at Enron. The PR people were ready to start smearing you, dropping little things, use other people to smear you.”

“I think that’s morally demoralising for PR departments to be forced to do that kind of stuff, but they are nine times out of 10, if they’re working for a company that doesn’t want the truthtellers’ information out there.”

Companies have got better at this stuff in the last few years, setting up hotlines so whistleblowers can make allegations anonymously.

I still think the most likely response of a large company to serious allegations is to dissemble and bring in the lawyers.

For the PR person caught in the middle of this there’s a (thin) line for them to walk which keeps them loyal to their client and their personal integrity intact.

I hope there is no one in the comms department at Boeing with reason to feel guilty about what happened to John Barnett.