The term, according to the Oxford Online Dictionary, means:
whistle-blower
A person who informs on a person or organization regarded as engaging in an unlawful or immoral activity.
Also from the American Heritage Dictionary:
whistleblower
One who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority: "The Pentagon's most famous whistleblower is … hoping to get another chance to search for government waste" (Washington Post).
According to Wikipedia :
The term whistle-blower comes from the whistle a referee uses to indicate an illegal or foul play. US civic activist Ralph Nader is said to have coined the phrase, but he in fact put a positive spin on the term in the early 1970s to avoid the negative connotations found in other words such as "informers" and "snitches".
It seems that whistleblower has acquired a positive connotation, but how does it differ from "informer" ? Or is it actually used as a synonyms of the above mentioned terms with a negative connotation?
Is a whistleblower someone who always act in the public interest and for this reason the term has a positive connotation?
Best Answer
Dictionary definitions and discussions of 'whistleblower'
Since the early 1970s, whistleblower does indeed seem to have had a strongly positive connotation in most popular usage, at least in the United States. William Safire, Safire's Political Dictionary (2008) has an interesting entry for the term:
Grant Barrett, The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (2004) traces the expression farther back than the 1970s, with some surprising negative citations from the earlier years:
Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960) has no entry for whistleblower but confirms Safire's note that whistler was a slang term for "informer":
Wentworth & Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, second supplemented edition (1967/1975) adds an entry for whistle blower:
Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995) has this:
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Update (October 2, 2019): Early derogatory use of 'whistle blower'/'whistle blowing'
An Elephind newspaper database search finds a slightly earlier instance than the one cited in The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang in which an editorial writer uses "whistle blower" in a seemingly derogatory way to describe a university coach who has made unflattering allegations against rival schools. From "Sports Time Out ... With Bob Fouts: Cas Speaks Up," in the [San Francisco, California] Monitor (April 25, 1958):
Fouts's column in the April 11, 1958, issue of the Monitor had quoted Belko (as reported in the [Portland] Oregonian) as saying "The NCAA must face the fact that independent or private schools such as Seattle are gathering players on a basis with which state institutions and schools allied in a major conference cannot hope to compete." Moreover, said Fouts,
A similar sense of "whistle blowing" seems to be at work a year-and-a-half earlier in an extremely bare-bones item titled "'Whistle Blowing'," in the San Bernardino [California] Sun (November 15, 1956):
Two articles published in the Stanford University student newspaper shed further light on this controversy. From Jerry Kelly, "Looking It Over," in the Stanford [California] Daily (October 31, 1956):
And from "Sterling Gives Reasons for Stand in PCC Turmoil," in the Stanford [California] Daily (November 4, 1958):
It thus appears that during the period 1956–1958, in the Far West U.S., the term "whistle blower" had a specific meaning involving the disclosure of misconduct (or rumors of misconduct) committed by rival university sport programs in retaliation for disclosures about one's own sports program's disclosed misconduct. It is easy to see why this behavior would not strike disinterested third parties as honorable, high-minded, or public-spirited, but rather as self-interested, vengeful, and vindictive.
The common element of athletic department intrigues in these early examples suggests that "whistle blower" may have arisen as an ironic way of likening such conduct to a referee stopping play during a game to point out and impose a penalty for some infraction or foul committed by one of the teams.
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How did 'whistleblower' evolve from 'stool pigeon' into 'brave truthteller'?
To judge from the earliest examples listed in The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang and from the definition of whistle blower in the 1975 edition of Dictionary of American Slang—as well as from the newspaper examples quoted from the period 1956–1958—whistleblower was by no means a positive term when it first emerged. But it benefited from a couple of things: in the early 1970s, when it began its transition in meaning from someone vile and abject to someone high minded and virtuous, it was not an especially well established or widely recognized synonym for the older terms fink, snitch, squealer, and stool pigeon; and unlike those terms, it didn't have a particularly unpleasant image associated with it (fink was originally Pink, as in "Pinkerton agent," and rat fink was in popular use by the middle 1960s; snitch was originally a verb meaning to steal; squealer has long had associations with pigs; and stool pigeon alludes to using captive pigeons tied to a stool to lure free pigeons into entrapment).
The person who may be most responsible for the transformation of whistleblower into an honorable term is Ralph Nader. Sometime in 1971, Nader and Donald Ross published Action for Change: A Student's Manual for Public Interest Organizing (1971) [combined snippets], which made the following argument:
In May 1971, Nader also published an article called "Responsibility and the Professional Society," which made similar points about the duty of professionals in industry and government to report wrongdoing by their organizations. In February 1972, he published yet another article on the same theme, "The Scientist and His Indentured Professional Societies." And in 1972, he co-edited a book called Whistleblowing that included an essay he wrote titled "An Anatomy of Whistle Blowing." In this essay, Nader presents the whistleblower as a hero of the (then) present age:
Coming as it did at the zenith of popular dissatisfaction with the System, the Status Quo, and the Man, Nader's presentation of whistleblowing as an act of defiance and greater-good morality seems to have struck a chord with the public. It didn't hurt that the villains in his description weren't small-time crooks or antiheroic mobsters, but the government and big business—the chief apostles and beneficiaries of mindless conformity, cynical exploitation, and genteel corruption.
Nader's various publications generated considerable comment—positive and negative—in professional journals and other media. When U.S. federal and state lawmakers in the early 1970s took up the issue of protecting public-spirited informants from malevolent employers, they adopted whistle-blower as the term of art for such informants.
Conclusions
The term whistleblower was used as early as 1956 as a pejorative term for an informer who sought to incriminate others for personal gain. But the sense of the term became far more positive and sympathetic in the early 1970s when Ralph Nader and other writers began using it to refer to a person who, as a public service and from a sense of moral obligation, reports wrongdoing by his or her corporation or government agency. State and federal laws eventually adopted the term, too.
Today, few people in the United States have any memory of hearing whistleblower used as a pejorative term, and modern dictionaries present it in a broadly sympathetic light. The multitude of unflattering terms available to describe an informer whose motives are less honorable than a modern-day whistleblower's gives writers and speakers little reason to go against the grain and use whistleblower in its original negative sense of "fink, snitch, squealer, or stool pigeon."