The Protected Disclosures Act was updated for the first time in 20 years recently with little fanfare or media attention. The government says it better protects whistleblowers who stick their necks out to report wrongdoing where they work - but not if they go so the media to it. Why not? Does this matter?
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Last month Kim Hill had a long and startling conversation on RNZ National with British journalist Meirion Jones, maker of a startling documentary ten years ago revealing that Jimmy Savile was a serial sex offender over the decades that he’d also been British media superstar at the BBC.
“I was absolutely 100 per cent in a whistleblower position. The BBC had covered up Savile for 30 years. Now they were covering up that cover-up by refusing to put out our film,” he told Kim Hill.
The BBC got cold feet and walked away from the project and Jones’ film was eventually broadcast by rival company ITV. It kicked off a fresh police investigation after Savile died in 2011 and only then was the scale of his crimes made plain in the media.
But plenty of people in the media claimed to have known at least some of what Savile was up to.
In 1990 journalist Lynn Barber wrote in The Independent that most of her British journalist peers thought he was a pedophile. Comedians even joked about it obliquely from time to time on prime time TV -- including, astonishingly, Savile himself.
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