MASSACHUSETTS
Huffington Post
Joe Bergantino
Co-founder and executive director of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting
Terry Knopf makes an important point in her article in the Columbia Journalism Review about Boston news coverage of the Catholic Church: for years, many reporters — in print and broadcast media — did not cover the Catholic archdiocese in the same way they covered government or other big institutions. Their reverence and respect for the Catholic religion — in many cases, the religion of their childhood — blinded them to possible wrongdoing inside the institution itself.
But that changed on the first Thursday in May in 1992, 10 years before the Globe’s reporting depicted in the movie Spotlight.
The lead story on WBZ-TV’s six o’clock newscast that night was the I-Team’s investigative report on former priest James Porter. The story revealed that Porter, while a priest in southeastern Massachusetts in the 1960s, had molested large numbers of children, that the Catholic Church moved him from parish to parish knowing that he was a serial pedophile, that the Cardinal at the time was made aware of Porter’s crimes and did little or nothing to stop him, and that even law enforcement had turned a blind eye to Porter’s rampage.
In that story, viewers heard Porter’s voice for the first time. In a recorded phone interview, I asked him how many children he had molested. His answer, without a trace of remorse or emotion: “50 or 60, I guess.” Porter didn’t know that the statute of limitations was frozen the moment he left Massachusetts more than 20 years earlier. In 1993, Porter pleaded guilty to molesting 28 children and spent the rest of his life behind bars.
The I-Team’s May 1992 story unleashed a torrent of local and national coverage focused on Porter and other pedophile priests in Boston. Within days, I, along with investigative producer Paul Toomey, began getting phone calls about other priests including John Geoghan, the priest who was the focus of the Spotlight coverage 10 years later.
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