BishopAccountability.org

All-in journalism

By John Brummett
Democrat-Gazette
December 6, 2015

http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2015/dec/06/all-in-journalism-20151206/

You should get out and see the Oscar-buzzed movie called Spotlight.

It dramatizes in realistic tones and with credible characters the finest in newspaper reporting, which is usually tedious, often resented, sadly fading and sometimes heroic.

After you've seen the movie, consider renewing your newspaper subscription.

Do that regardless of whether you can abide the editorials and columnists. Those can be taken or left. Investigative reporting can change the world.

Invest a few dollars in your community and in a principle.


I refer to the principle of hardworking and obsessively passionate and curious people who sometimes can be societal misfits--they're called newspaper reporters--and who toil night and day for modest pay in a limping industry to ask in your behalf the things you can't or won't.

I refer to the age-old principle of a newspaper daring to pursue truth to afflict the comfortable, like the Catholic Church in an overpoweringly Catholic town like Boston, and comfort the afflicted, like the hundreds of priest-abused children in and around Boston.

I refer to the principle of finding out and revealing things that need to be found out and revealed. I refer to the principle of not revealing what you've found out until you've locked it down and asked one more question of one more source.

I refer to the principle of presenting that truth directly and objectively, absent those adjectives that the editor takes out while copy-reading the epic text that his paper will put on doorsteps Sunday morning, even as the paper figures it may need extra security on Monday.

Spotlight is about the Boston Globe's local coverage beginning in 2001 of the Catholic Church's scandal of sexual abuse of young boys by priests.

The newspaper story is simple: A pattern of abuse of children by religious authority figures is covered up by a community's power structure, and shouldn't be.

The movie story has more layers and texture.

Having spent 46 years toiling in and around newspapers, I kept identifying with what I was seeing--with the partitioned newsroom, the rat-infested file room, the scruffiness and frumpiness and nosiness and single-mindedness of the personnel.

I identified with the sendoff party for a colleague apparently getting early retirement as part of yet another staff reduction.

I identified with members of the special investigative-reporting team worrying about the new editor coming up from Miami, and about the inevitability of more layoffs and early retirements, not to mention the future of an investigative team that takes months to work on one assignment during an era of trying to produce more with fewer people.

I recognized the new editor who turned out to possess very little in the way of a personality, but to be a fierce news professional with a clear vision of a newspaper's responsibility to its local readership.

I recognized the perfectly fine local journalists who initially balked at this parachuted new editor's idea to investigate the local Catholic Church, and who instinctively defended themselves against the implication they hadn't covered it adequately already. And I recognized that these local journalists were so deeply connected to their city, as they needed to be, that the forest was escaping them. And I recognized and admired that they came to admit that the community's failure they were exposing was one in which they had participated.

I suspect that all viewers will recognize the oppressive presence of the community's power structure, and the unwritten rule that you don't cross it.

In the movie the new editor gets summoned for a faux-friendly introduction and intimidation session with the cardinal himself. The cardinal's smilingly condescending message is that Boston is a great city because we're all in this together. The Jewish editor new to town--Marty Baron, who now leads a revived Washington Post--works up the nerve to tell the cardinal that, actually, in his view, a good newspaper isn't part of a team, but, by necessity, a loner.

Here's the most fascinating, relevant and, I hope, enduring element of the story: This new editor, assigned by headquarters to shore up an economically declining newspaper, goes at the task not by shutting down the high-cost investigative team or pandering to the community's elites.

Instead he goes all-in for journalism, for reporting, for exploring and eventually exposing the community's cancer--not abuse of children by priests, exactly, but the controlling elites' longtime complicity by their official pretense that the abuse shouldn't be talked about.

The editor believed in a newspaper that connected with its city in service to the only real sources of newspaper success. Those are readers and right.

So, from All the President's Men to Spotlight, from tangling with the White House to tangling with the Roman Catholic Church, good newspapering may be a movie we need to keep watching.

Contact: jbrummett@arkansasonline.com




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