Syracuse University is teaming up with the Government Accountability Project for the second consecutive year to present “The Whistleblower, the Press and the Truth” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium.

Whistleblowers and journalists will make up the three-person panel, and will discuss the legal and ethical dilemmas facing whistleblowers.

This year’s panel will feature Kristina Borjesson, Thomas Tamm and Louis Clark. Borjesson has been a freelance journalist for more than 30 years, and has long been an advocate of journalists supporting and using whistleblowers as sources. Tamm, a former Department of Justice employee, blew the whistle on the George W. Bush administration’s wiretapping program. Clark is the president of the

Government Accountability Project and frequently negotiates with government and corporate officials over legal cases.

The GAP is an organization dedicated to the protection and advocacy of whistleblowers in the United States. The GAP often pairs whistleblowers with lawyers, and helps prove the wrongdoing to the public.

Roy Gutterman, a communications law professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, will be the moderator of the panel discussion, a discussion that Gutterman said he believes is necessary.

“I think it’s important for students to learn how to cultivate these high-level sources, these are the kinds of people that reporters need to find to tell the important stories,” Gutterman said.

Gutterman will represent the Newhouse School, one of the event’s sponsors. Other SU schools to sponsor the event include the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

The discussion will touch on proper sourcing, the risks that whistleblowers and journalists take and the protections available to them, Gutterman said.

The topic of whistleblowing is currently a hot one. With high profile cases in the news such as Chelsea Manning, who released more than 100,000 documents to WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, who released National Security Agency documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post.

“These types of issues percolate from time to time, and right now leaks and whistleblowers… have been really driving some upper levels of journalism these days and we try to have events that reflect current topics,” Gutterman said.

Published on March 31, 2015 at 11:00 pm

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