UNITED STATES
South China Morning Post

Story based on the Boston Globe investigation that uncovered the facilitation of child abuse by the Catholic Church dissects the news media’s watchdog role, writes Roy J. Harris Jnr

The best lessons about how journalists work come from seeing them in action. And no film has ever done a better job than Spotlight of showing reporters and editors in their “watchdog” role: digging out important news that others want kept secret.

The film tells the story of four members of The Boston Globe’s investigative unit, the Spotlight team, and follows what happens after the newspaper’s editor, on his first day on the job, in 2001, tasks them with looking into the case of a defrocked Catholic priest who had been repeatedly accused of sexually abusing children in his care. This leads them to investigate whether church leaders in Boston, in the northeastern United…