Bradley Manning: imprisoned, tortured. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo: lost her career at the Environmental Protection Agency. Karen Silkwood: died in a suspicious car accident. Gary Webb and Deborah Jeane Palfrey: committed suicide, the former having lost his career, the latter under threat of a fifty-five-year prison sentence. Adrian Schoolcraft: involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward.

This isn’t a country that necessarily holds whistleblowers in the highest regard.

For the past week, the media has been struck by Dorner fever, anxiously covering the most minute developments in Southern California’s hunt for an ex-cop alleged to have killed four people: a daughter of an LAPD officer and her fiancée, and a police officer in Riverside county, and an officer involved in the shootout at a cabin in the wilderness.