Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy, tells the story of how The Boston Globe’s investigative team
uncovered the systemic cover-up of child abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese. Since its 2015 release, the film has been universally acclaimed for keeping true to the already-compelling story it tells, honoring both the audience and the film’s subjects and earning the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
Perhaps one aspect of Spotlight ironically skirted by the reviews is the importance of the media. Spotlight not only tells a compelling story of the uncovering of a scandal, but also highlights the importance of investigative journalism that seems to be getting lost through the transparency of the Internet. In the film, Walter “Robbie” Robinson (Michael Keaton) and Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) stress the importance of digging into the system and proving the Archdiocese’s responsibility for systemic rather than a one-time cover-up of child abuse at the hands of priests. Notes are taken by hand, and nothing is said about the story in The Boston Globe until the Spotlight team publishes the first story in a series of six hundred regarding the scandal. Keeping the details confidential and working tirelessly to learn the full story is a reference to the importance of closing all loopholes to prevent potentially justified attacks from, in this case, the Catholic church.
In the day and age of the Internet-driven society, we are losing the art of true investigative journalism. In the film, Robbie Robinson explains to Marty Baron that once the Spotlight team settles on a project, they can spend up to or more than a year investigating it. In the fifteen years since The Boston Globe published the first stories about the scandal, news reporting seems to have undergone a dramatic change. Nowadays, news reporting is driven by the need to be the first to publish the skeleton story. Follow-up stories are for further details and for additional developments. There is much more emphasis on live news, on the audience watching the story unfold as the news outlets uncover it.
The release of Spotlight in this current frenzy of piece-by-piece stories serves to tell the story of child abuse within the Boston Archdiocese while also gracefully, perhaps more subtly, emphasizing the importance of investigative journalism – the core of which is to uncover the whole story and fit the most crucial of the pieces together before publishing the initial story. Future viewers of Spotlight should watch the film to follow and learn of the story, but also as a reminder of the beauty of true investigative journalism that is becoming lost to the wonders of the Internet.
By Karina Cheah
