ABSTRACT
Scandals and whistleblowing are strongly connected. Whistleblowers can be the origin of a scandal, can bring evidence for a scandal to begin, or can be the raison d’être of a scandal themselves. Regardless of their role in sparking public outrage, several instances of scandals have been initiated by whistleblowers over the years. The “Watergate” and the “Pentagon Papers”, probably the most emblematic examples of whistleblowing from the history of journalism, together with the WikiLeaks publications from 2010 about US warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Snowden case, the “Panama” and “Paradise Papers,” and the Cambridge Analytica cases are only some of the most powerful mainstream scandals generated from the cooperation of whistleblowers and journalists. Many other instances, on national and regional if not metropolitan levels, have certainly made the news in their areas of influence, although without reaching the interest of international audiences: tracking whistleblowing cases and their impact can be complex, especially when whistleblowers decide to stay anonymous and not to appear publicly as the sources of their revelations. The presence of a declared whistleblower, like Edward Snowden or Christopher Wylie for the Cambridge Analytica case, is by itself a sign that scandalization will potentially follow the explosion of a whistleblowing case, but the overall impact may vary according to the severity of the misbehavior exposed, their direct impact on society at large, their capability of setting the agenda of the public debate, and their strength in shaping policy changes and influencing change as a response.
