“A thrilling look into the real-life David vs. Goliath stories”
Last month, CBS broadcasted the first episode of a new series, Whistleblower. The network describes the show, which debuted on July 13th, as taking “a thrilling look into the real-life David vs. Goliath stories of heroic people who put everything on the line in order to expose illegal and often dangerous wrongdoing when major corporations rip off U.S. taxpayers.”
The show is produced by CBS News for CBS Television Studios. Whistleblower’s senior executive producer is Emmy Award winner Susan Zirinsky (48 hours, 48 Hours: NCIS).
On the show’s first episode, on-camera host Alex Ferrer (a lawyer out of Boca Raton, Florida who was previously a police officer) says to the audience, “Blow the whistle, change the world,” as the show’s ending tagline.
Ferrer is also a former judge from Florida’s 11th Judicial Circuit and was also an associate at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan law firm. He was once featured on “Judge Alex.”
On the first episode, which had 3.07 million viewers in its 8 p.m. EDT time slot according to TV Series Finale, two dentists are taken back by unsafe and fraudulent practices they saw that were standard at a certain pediatric dental chain, which provides services to the underprivileged. These dentists were fearful that these practices could lead to overbilling, overtreatment and a risk for the safety of the children, so they chose to step up to the plate, taking matters into their own hands.
Also in the first episode, a whistleblower pursues a pharmaceutical giant for using expensive vacations, illicit bribes and sumptuous dinners to obtain illegal access to patient medical records as well as coercing doctors to prescribe the highest priced medications.
Every hour of the show introduces new cases in which people step up to take on the extraordinary by risking everything they have, from their careers to their families and even their lives in order to ensure that nobody else is harmed in any way by unethical corporate greed.
According to Ferrer, whistleblowers’ stories are stories of heroes. These heroes are almost immediately crushed by their employers who will try to discredit them, often destroying their reputations so nobody will hire them. Some lose their homes. Other’s marriages and relationships face difficulties as well. Much of the time there are other people within the companies who know what is going on but do not have the courage to come forward – except for these heroes.
Many of the whistleblowers on the show know up front that things are not going to be good for them but they still come forward as a result of their moral concept and because it is often financially rewarding for them at the end.
The shows highlights many heroes when it comes to corporate greed and is a great sneak peak into the world of whistleblowing.
