To Rat Or Not To Rat …

This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

The place was 243 Walden Drive, Glencoe, Illinois. The ravine was actually on Crescent Lane, maybe 500 yards away. The year was 1966. Or maybe 1965, I can't quite remember. I was seven or eight and in a jam.

It was my birthday. In that pre-video, perhaps pre-color TV, era, my mother had rented real cartoons to play on a real film projector for my birthday party. The man in charge of the projector was my older brother, Jimmy, a crack member of the A-V Club at his junior high. It all went fine until after the party. During the crucial rewind process, the film -- the precious rented, high tech strip -- tore.

This was a potential disaster. Broken stuff meant trouble; broken stuff that wasn't yours could easily mean punishment. Dad might even get involved. It seemed like a scandal.

Jimmy made the splice and I followed him to the ravine -- our secret, kids only domain-- and he dumped the evidence. He swore me to secrecy. He was five years older than I, very strong and he hit. I took the oath.

By dinnertime, I had ratted him out to our parents. I was Deep Throat and I sang like a bird. Knowing me, I probably asked them not to tell Jimmy who narced on him. I wasn't a bright boy.

Today, Jimmy is a model citizen, a pillar of his community and a fine American. I am a journalist. Anything else you care to know?

Not all whistleblowers and leakers are altruistic, well-intentioned or remotely useful to society. Many, perhaps most, are like I was -- a weasel snitching on someone in a cowardly way for revenge. Anonymity and secrets are tricky business.

Many capital J-Journalists have portrayed the unveiling of Deep Throat this week as divine intervention intended to remind American society that it needs anonymous sources and whistle-blowers. It's miraculous timing as some reporters (Mathew Cooper and Judith Miller in the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson leak case) face jail time because they won't give up their sources and when some organizations such as CBS News and Newsweek have made high-profile errors using anonymous sources.

We'll largely leave that argument to others, except for this point: it is a great confusion to lump the Deep Throats of the world, the true whistle-blowers who truly risk their livelihoods and reputations over important issues, with petty leakers and hacks that are cast as anonymous sources in news stories day in and day out. That's comparing rotten apples to curative oranges.

I really wanted to take you back to the mean streets of Beaver Cleaver-land for different reasons. Forty years later, it seems to me that 'to rat or not to rat' is one of the most common serious ethical conflicts that grown-ups face. It is a rare area of shared experience between private people -- parents, workers, community members -- and public people. And it's tricky business.

The ethics of snitching, I learned early and poorly, is complicated in private family life. Parents know that. We've all told our kids not to be tattle-tales. But what if your daughter catches your son playing with matches? What should she do? There are competing and conflicting values: not being a tattle-tale, loyalty to a sibling and a serious safety concern. Reconciling them without shorting one of those values is impossible.

But most of us face these dilemmas more commonly at work (see Enron, Tyco, AIG, Fannie Mae -- you pick). It's not hard to concoct examples that ring true. Many of us frequently witness wrongdoing, often petty, sometimes not: abusive bosses, sexual or racial harassment, lying, violations of professional ethics or corporate rules, substance abuse.

Sometimes these are the things that we gossip about. Gossip is the moral equivalent routine Washington leaking.

Exposing real wrongdoing at personal risk is an entirely different matter. That's whistle-blowing. That's how we learned about Watergate and Abu Ghraib. And it's clear from the recent crime wave that in private and commercial America there is not enough whistle-blowing even if there may be too much low-grade snitching.

I think it's clear that on many fronts, America has become too tolerant of cutting ethical corners -- in business, education, journalism, medicine. Ironically, this comes at a time when cell phones and computers make anonymous communication much easier.

Having been both a snitcher and a snitchee, I have become very wary of the cloak of anonymity. As I said, I'm not so bright. Rarely is it wise and honorable to do something in darkness that you wouldn't do in light. It may be heresy for a journalist to say that now. But I think it is ethical guidance that applies well to both public and private life.

And if I go to the ravine again, I'm not telling.

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Against the Grain. We will publish some of the interesting (and civil) ones, sometimes in edited form.

By Dick Meyer