The Post's (Welcome) About-Face

This Washington Post masthead editorial praises the actions of a city-employee whistleblower that exposed a $50 million scheme in the Washington, D.C. tax office – one that reeked on several levels of blatant corruption. The piece, which lays out why whistleblowers are effective and needed, ends with “Nothing is more effective than having workers willing to blow the whistle on wrongdoing.”

Right on. This is absolutely correct. One can only wish that the same outlet was this forthcoming about whistleblower rights, or even smimila-minded about them, just last month. You see, this is almost an about-face from an editorial from the same board some months back.

In February, the outlet ran this piece, which attacked whistleblower advocates for trying to attach long-overdue federal employee whistleblower protections to the stimulus package. Even though these protections would have better allowed federal employees to expose wrongdoing involving stimulus money.

What accounts for the discrepancy? Yes, the February editorial did spend some time talking about the intelligence employee provisions and why they shouldn’t be attached – but they still attacked the whole bill, stating –

“…attaching the bill to the stimulus package under the pretext that stronger whistleblower protections will enhance fiscal accountability is disingenuous.”

No, it wasn’t. Just because these protections were advocated before for years didn’t make them irrelevant to the stimulus package.

Still, it’s a good thing for the Post to support the actions a whistleblower so publicly. Let’s see what they think of Rep. Chris Van Hollen’s (and others) re-introduction of the whistleblower protection legislation, which isn’t attached…

-- Dylan Blaylock