The movie “Spotlight,” based on the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of the Catholic Church’s shielding of pedophile priests, has come along at an opportune moment for journalists.
News media bashing has always been a popular pastime in America, but lately the attacks are coming from all sides.
Consider the clown car of Republican presidential candidates who wave off every question they don’t want to answer as a “gotcha” question from a grandstanding reporter.
This is an obvious diversionary tactic. Nothing personal, you might say. At the University of Missouri last month, minority student protesters and their self-appointed protectors seemed to harbor a more visceral loathing for the ladies and gentlemen of the press.
This was an astonishing spectacle for a veteran reporter like me.
Cristina Mislán, who earned her Ph.D. from Penn State’s College of Communications and now teaches at Mizzou, explained why the protesters tried to block press access to their encampment on university grounds.
“There’s a lot of mistrust,” she said. “We (minorities) don’t necessarily always trust mainstream media to tell our stories the way we think they should be told because the history shows us that, time and again, we’ve had narratives that have demonized us or made us into violent people.”
My only objection to Mislán’s argument is that it’s incomplete. History also shows that the press played a vital role in the Civil Rights movement. (Read “The Race Beat” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff.)
As Dr. King well knew, protests are media events, first and foremost. Their purpose is to draw attention to your cause in the belief that a just cause will elicit public sympathy, which will intensify the pressure for change.
I once walked toward a demonstration and saw the protesters sitting on the curb with their signs facedown on the pavement – until I got close enough for them to see that I was carrying a camera and a reporter’s notebook.
Then they all rose, shouldered their signs, and began marching and chanting. My fellow reporters and I were the conduit through which their message would reach the wider world.
The other thing that exasperates journalists about press bashing is the broad-brush aspect of it. Now more than ever it is meaningless to talk about “the media” as if it’s all one thing. Blogs, tabloids, and old warhorses like The New York Times all get lumped into the same catchall category.
What’s seductive about that kind of thinking is that it saves us the trouble of separating responsible media outlets from irresponsible ones: We can ignore them all. It’s laziness posing as worldliness.
A sad truth about journalism is that it tends to be better when revenue streams from advertising and circulation are strong, and worse when those streams are weak. “Spotlight” begins with the arrival, in 2001, of new editor Marty Baron. His staff is worried that he comes bearing a hatchet with which to prune the Globe’s newsroom.
But this was early in the sharp decline in advertising and circulation revenue that led newspapers to shrink their workforces, their pages and, in some cases, their publication schedule (many reduced their publication schedule to never).
Baron can still afford, barely, to put readers ahead of shareholders so he pushes the Spotlight investigative team to hold the Catholic Church accountable for its handling of the sexual abuse of children by Boston priests.
It’s an inspiring tale, and a realistic one insofar as it shows investigative reporters doing the antiheroic work of poring over documents. (Since this was the aspect of the job I had the least patience for when I was a reporter, it’s what I find most heroic in my peers.)
“Spotlight” reminds us of something we should not need to be reminded of: that good journalism is essential.
With lean times in the news business lasting as long as they have, one has to wonder how much skullduggery is going unreported in places where staff cuts have made investigative reporting all but impossible, or the obsession with “click bait” has led editors to devote more resources to Miley, Kim, and Caitlyn than to lying, cheating and stealing in high places.
It may be harder to hack your way to the good journalism through the thicket of nonsense that obscures it, but it’s there, whether it’s produced by century-old newspapers or by upstart startups.
New media make it possible for protesters like the students at Missouri to tell their own story instead of entrusting that story to the press. But we, the public, want more than their story, just as we want more than the university administration’s story.
We want to hear from all the stakeholders and often, for all their flaws and blind spots, the most trustworthy tellers of that story are still those ladies and gentlemen of the press.
