UNITED STATES
Dallas Observer
BY JIM SCHUTZE
TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016
You have to wonder: Are daily newspaper people ever struck by the fact that a movie about what they do is so much more popular than they are?
Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s movie about The Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on child molestation among Catholic clergy, was two things. It was a really great movie, and it was a delicious opportunity for self-back-patting by old ink-stained wretches. Like myself.
I watched. I patted. But since the Oscar ceremony, it has taken me a month or more to figure out why the discussion of the movie within my craft inevitably leaves me so sad and lonely. Oh, now I remember. It’s not the movie. It’s the craft.
For every bathetic reminiscence about the way it was when dailies ruled, about what they did and how great they were, I hear at least three expressions of complete bafflement about why dailies don’t do it anymore.
On the PBS Newshour recently, former New York Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan said, “But I think that the will to do this kind of work is weakening somewhat, and it has to be beefed up. Spotlight is such an inspiring movie, that I’m hopeful that it will cause owners and editors and publishers to realize just how important this work is and to fund it and to get behind it.”
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