AUSTRALIA
The Conversation
Brian McNair
Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology
I have been in Tasmania these last few days, by coincidence at the same time as the royal commission has held hearings in Hobart into paedophilia in the Church of England in which senior Christian clerics have been apologising for the sexual abuse of children and young people. Meanwhilem the new film Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy, has been winning multiple industry awards (and is a hot tip for Oscar success).
Spotlight tells the story of how, in the early 2000s, investigative journalists in Boston broke the first stories of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, setting off a wave of scandals which has spread around the world and has still not subsided.
In an era when journalists come in for a lot of stick from politicians and publics regarding their propensity for bias, or for sensationalism and sleaze in the pursuit of audiences, the film reminds us why journalism matters, and the good work so many times of its practitioners do on our behalf.
In Spotlight, the journalists and their editors at the Boston Globe take on one of the world’s most powerful and secretive institutions. They expose the moral corruption that great and (until that moment) largely unaccountable power breeds.
Like the iconic All The President’s Men of 40 years ago, Spotlight is a work of popular cinematic art which celebrates the good things that journalists do, and the risks they often take in the process. Where last year’s Nightcrawler depicted the very worst that mainstream journalism can be, with its villainous sleaze monger played to creepy perfection by Jake Gyllenhaal, Spotlight represents the journalist as hero, and highlights the function of journalism as a Fourth Estate telling truth to power in the manner without which our modern democracies could not survive.
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