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Comment by ITB | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, there are people that look at whistleblowing as a way to propel into fame. They call themselves and whistleblowers when in reality they are just publicly critiquing their company over known facts. They give whistleblowing a bad reputation.

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Do you have examples of people who have been enriched by so-called whistleblowing?

I think Frances Haugen just wanted to be famous. She didn’t whistleblow anything really and yet called herself a whistleblower.

Sure; all kinds of motives may be involved. It would be interesting to read a study on how these laws and their practices have worked in practice and what kind of issues have been reported. From the article's references I found this:

https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx...

I suppose much of the reports have been about financial mishandling, work safety, and such things, maybe things like environment protection violations thrown in.

That's not whistleblowing, so no, it does not give whistleblowing a bad name. This is actually very simple.

the media labels them whistleblowers though so doesn't it?

I often wonder if such people are being encourage by those who seek to undermine the concept of whistleblowing as a whole. Like encouraging the appending of 'gate' to every scandal name, even trivial ones, to minimize the seriousness of Watergate.

EDIT: I should point out that an effective strategy to undermine opposition is to encourage the worst in them by secretly supporting those who embody the worst. When doing this it helps to have contacts in the media on your payroll.

Whistleblowers don't do that. The media does. Do you know what whistleblowing is?

Is the motivation to minimize the seriousness of Watergate? I just take it as a lazy way of tagging a story and I suspect many headline writers couldn't even summarise what the original Watergate scandal involved.

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