ARIZONA
Downtown Devil
By Kelsey Hess – September 15, 2016
There is a long, deafening silence that follows the end of the Academy Award-winning film, Spotlight.
That silence was the result of a stunned audience when I saw Spotlight at the AMC Theatre in the Arizona Center last November upon release. Nearly one year later at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the film brought out a similar reaction from ASU journalism students as a long list of cities represented that, yes, priests in your hometown – or a town just like it – have been caught molesting children.
Spotlight, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards last year in a triumphant win for journalism, followed the story of new Cronkite professor and The Boston Globe’s Walter Robinson and his investigative reporting team through their discovery of the cover-up of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. The article resulted in 300 calls from victims the day after the article was printed from as far as Australia. Nearly 600 follow-up articles were written by the Spotlight team in the year following.
“We knew it was going to be a good story but we had no idea it would reverberate the way it did,” Robinson said to the crowd of students on Wednesday night. “It became apparent that this was a systematic problem. It’s not the crime as much as it is the cover-up; it became much clearer that everyone knew and had to have had facilitated this.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.