One of the hottest contenders for the Best Picture Oscar, Spotlight tells the powerful true story of how the eponymous team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe exposed a decades-long cover-up by the Catholic Church to protect priests guilty of sexually abusing children.
That the
investigation took place at all is credited to the Globe's first
Jewish editor, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the film),
who, on his first day at the paper, saw a story that he felt needed
to be pursued.
Baron
had come from the Miami Herald and was an unusual appointment. “The
newspaper had been accustomed to having people who have a strong
connection to Boston be in charge of it,” he tells me from his
office at the Washington Post, where he is Executive Editor, “and I
think the entire community was accustomed to that as well.
I
had spent almost no time in the city and so I was labelled an
outsider; and made to feel like an outsider.”
While
being “somewhat the object of wariness” created discomfort, he
had the advantage of being able to “see things through fresh eyes”,
he suggests. “I didn't have any attachments to the community at
all. I had no allegiances, no obligations as a result of friendship,
nothing like that. So I think that allowed me to approach things with
some level of distance and objectivity.”
Miami
had been somewhere “all kinds of crazy things happen” and he
didn't know if Boston would be “as wild and woolly”. However,
that quickly changed.
The
day before he started work, the Globe ran a story by columnist Eileen
McNamara about a priest, John Geoghan, who'd been accused of abusing
80 children. In it, a lawyer for the plaintiff claimed that Cardinal
Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew of the abuse, and yet had allowed
the priest to be reassigned to different parishes.
“The
response from the Church, via its lawyer, was that these were
irresponsible, baseless charges,” says Baron. “So you had
duelling commentaries about these serious allegations.”
What
intrigued him most was that McNamara said the truth may never be
known, because the internal Church documents that might reveal it
were under seal and subject to a confidentiality order.
At
his first editorial meeting the following day, Baron proposed trying
to get the seal lifted through legal channels. He then asked the
paper's Spotlight team of investigative journalists to explore
whether Geoghan represented a bigger problem.
The
probe would bring the reporters and the paper up against the Catholic
Church, whose buildings dominate the Boston skyline in the
working-class areas where most victims came from, physically
illustrating its influence over the life of the city. Baron, however,
is not a man to be cowed.
As
the editor of his high school newspaper in Florida, he refused to
back down over a story that upset the administration. Since then, as
well as the Catholic Church, he has stood up to the White House over
stories about lapses in Secret Service coverage for the president,
and resisted pressure to not publish confidential National Security
Agency memos leaked by Edward Snowden.
Neither
of his parents, who emigrated from Israel to the United States in the
mid 50s, was in journalism. But they had a keen interest in news
about the public affairs of their adopted home - “As a matter of
routine in our household we'd read a local newspaper and watch the
television news” - and this rubbed off on him.
At
school he was aware of “people of a certain status in life who felt
that they were entitled and privileged”, and says: “I think I've
always been conscious of elites in society, and very leery of elites,
frankly.”
Today,
he sees it as a “special obligation of the news media to hold
powerful individuals, powerful institutions, accountable. Because my
view is if we don't do it, nobody else will.”
As
a result of the movie, people have asked him why he went after the
Catholic Church. The question irritates him. “I didn't decide to
take on the Catholic Church,” he says firmly. “I decided to
pursue a story that was in front of us. It was a journalistic impulse
. . . It became apparent to me, fairly quickly, that we had not
pursued every possible channel for getting at the truth. And that's
my job.”
However,
he did insist that they wouldn't publish until they had evidence of
institutional malpractice. Simply reporting how many priests were
involved would have struck people as sensational, he insists. For him
the more powerful questions concerned why they had been allowed to
get away with the abuse for so long.
The
facts uncovered were so damaging and so shocking that they didn't
need to be sensationalised or conveyed with emotive language.
Baron
and his team were expecting “blowback” when the first part of
their (ultimately Pulitzer-winning) series of reports ran on January
6th,
2002. “We actually stepped up on the switchboard because we were
expecting a lot of criticism, and people to call and complain and
accuse us of being anti-Catholic.” Instead, as portrayed in the
film, “there was an eerie silence”.
“I
think there was a strong feeling of betrayal amongst Catholics in
Boston,” offers Baron, “and they were able to feel that sense of
betrayal especially acutely because we were able to put in front of
them the actual internal Church documents that showed how the Church
had deceived, had obstructed, and had ignored this problem for such a
long period of time.”
The
pain that had been inflicted on children over many years was finally
laid bare. Survivors now came forward in huge numbers to relate their
stories, achieving what Baron sees as another key part of the
“journalistic mission”: breaking the silence.
“I
do think that we have to be especially attentive to people who are at
the margins of our society, who don't have power, and who have not
been given a voice,” he says.
“One
of the great lessons of this movie is that people who have been left
voiceless can have very powerful things to say, and it's important
that we listen to what they have to say. And at times act on it.”
The
message could hardly be more timely.
Spotlight is on general release
This story first appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, January 29, 2016
