Tom McCarthy’s ‘Spotlight’ (second review)

America’s earliest newspapers in the 18th century were mostly political broadsheets published not so much to report news as to support political parties in exchange for patronage. By the 19th century, most newspapers had adjusted their mission: Now they aimed to entertain their readers with rip-roaring reports — true or false — of crimes, fires, and train wrecks, and/or to boost the local economy. (In the 1860s the Rocky Mountain News routinely reported fictitious arrivals and departures of commercial ships on the barely navigable South Platte River, the better to entice investment from gullible Easterners.)

Even in the first half of the 20th century, journalists rarely finished high school — if they got that far — and consequently lacked the expertise to confront society’s movers and shakers as anything more than humble supplicants. (In Nearly Everybody Read It, a collection of reminiscences by alumni of Philadelphia’s Bulletin, James Perry recalled that he once proposed a series of articles about how developers were haphazardly gobbling up suburban open spaces; the editor rejected his idea, explaining that no reporter on the staff was qualified to write it.) Even today, most journalists — and especially most journalists on TV and the Internet, now the source of most Americans’ information — rarely think in terms of anything beyond a 24-hour news cycle, and more likely an hourly cycle.

Scrambling for scoops

Out of this cacophony grew a healthy tradition of unfettered free speech, but no tradition of pausing to examine the big picture. The reason the world is so screwed up, I have suggested in the past, is that the professional communicators (like journalists) don’t know anything, and the experts (like academics) can’t communicate. The notion of a serious independent professional news organization capable of piercing and exposing the complex systemic failures of major institutions is a relatively recent phenomenon, as a glance at journalistic literature will confirm.

• Newspaper Days, H. L. Mencken’s memoir of his early years on the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the 20th century, recalls a time when most editors and reporters were drunk for the majority of their waking hours, much like the politicians, judges, and cops they covered.

• The Front Page, the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur Broadway comedy, captured the madcap excitement of Chicago’s tabloid newspaper scene, in which competing editors and reporters expended most of their brains and energy scrambling for scoops that would wrap garbage the following day. Here (and in several subsequent film adaptations, most notably His Girl Friday in 1940), the journalists are no longer drunk, but they remain low forms of plant life, as cynical and shortsighted as the police and politicians they cover.

From Bogart to Watergate

• Deadline - U.S.A. (1952) raised the bar by introducing movie audiences to the concept of crusading journalism. As conceived by writer-director Richard Brooks, The Day is a dying metropolitan daily whose heroic managing editor (Humphrey Bogart) struggles to publish an exposé of an organized crime mobster before the paper folds. The story was sheer Hollywood fiction, of course. But Deadline - U.S.A. lovingly evoked the culture of a real-life metropolitan daily newspaper (said to be modeled after Philadelphia’s Bulletin). More important, it made the case for the vital role of mass media in a modern urban society.

• All the President’s Men (1976) raised the bar higher still. This time the crusading journalists, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), confront not some minor Mafia kingpin but the president of the United States; they work for the Washington Post, a prosperous company that can afford the time to fit together the pieces of an intricate puzzle that leads them from a two-bit burglary at the Watergate office complex all the way to the White House. They and their bosses possess both the education and the long-term experience to confront their counterparts in government as equals, and, of course, the story is true. Never before had a film so effectively captured the tedious work and human frustration involved in producing great journalism. (Full disclosure: Alan Pakula, who directed All the President’s Men, was my cousin.)

More powerful than Nixon

Now Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight has raised the bar even higher. Here the subject is the Boston Globe’s investigation of sexual abuse of young boys (as well as some girls) by Catholic priests, which began with a single case that led to dozens more in Boston and ultimately to the discovery of a global pattern of priestly abuse and a culture of cover-up at the Church’s highest levels.

As in All the President’s Men, the four members of the Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team find themselves up against an awesomely powerful institution — in many ways more impenetrable than the federal government, due to the Catholic Church’s insularity and permanence, not to mention its claim to supernatural moral authority. (When a reporter asks why a victim let a priest molest him, the fellow responds, “How do you say no to God?”) In their quest for the story, these reporters confront multiple challenges: not only resistance from the Church and its allies in the courts and government, but also from abuse survivors reluctant to dredge up painful old memories, as well as victim advocates who distrust the Globe for having ignored or buried their complaints for so many years. Spotlight works best when it dramatizes the hard reportorial work of winning people’s confidence by appealing to their consciences to speak up about what they know.

Where All the President’s Men sometimes yielded to the temptation to hype the drama (Robert Redford, on the phone to the White House, desperately searches for a pen and paper; Dustin Hoffman, interviewing a woman in her home, excuses himself to go the bathroom so he can scribble notes on toilet paper), Spotlight remains consistently true to journalistic practice. Its reporters have their pads and pencils ready the moment a phone call or interview begins, just as I was taught back in the day. They also understand another rule I was taught: Never underestimate the value of a direct question, because while most people will evade the truth, few will tell outright lies. When Rachel McAdams as the reporter Sacha Pfeiffer finds herself face-to-face with an alleged abusive priest, she identifies herself and asks, “Did you molest boys?” The startled priest answers affirmatively before spinning his rationalization.

‘That’s the presses, baby!’

These are journalists well schooled in the intellectual underpinnings of their work and consequently not easily cowed by their adversaries. When Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou) tells the Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), “A city flourishes when its great institutions work together,” Baron replies, “I’m of the opinion that a newspaper works best when it stands alone,” without elaborating further. When a court clerk asks reporter Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) what good could come from exposing affidavits detailing sexual abuse, Rezendes asks what good could come from suppressing them.

When the story finally breaks, we see the obligatory shots of presses running and delivery trucks leaving the loading dock, just as we did in Deadline - U.S.A. and All the President’s Men — Hollywood shorthand for getting the truth out. Deadline - U.S.A., in fact, closed with a scene in the pressroom where Bogart as editor takes one last threatening phone call from Rienzi, the gangster he is about to expose. As the presses begin to roll, Rienzi (Martin Gabel) asks, “What’s that noise?” Bogart replies: “That’s the presses, baby. And there’s nothing you can do about it!” In Spotlight such heavy-handed rhetoric is unnecessary: The story speaks for itself.

Following Spotlight’s release last year, a commentator on the Vatican website graciously observed that the Globe reporters “made themselves examples of their most pure vocation, that of finding the facts, verifying sources, and making themselves — for the good of the community and of a city — paladins of the need for justice." The Globe journalists can indeed take pride in transforming a once-despised occupation into a role model for the Vatican, of all institutions. But this is no time for self-congratulation.

From giants to dinosaurs

The Boston Globe, acquired by the New York Times in 1993 for $1.1 billion, was sold in 2013 for a mere $70 million. The Times itself, the gold standard of global journalism, survives today largely by having sold one-sixth of its voting stock to the Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim. After 80 years under the ownership of the Meyer/Graham family, the Washington Post of Watergate fame was sold in 2013 to the Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. The Philadelphia Inquirer, winner of 20 Pulitzer prizes, was once the flagship of the respected Knight-Ridder newspaper chain; now Knight-Ridder is gone and the Inquirer has changed hands five times since 2006, most recently yesterday, when owner Gerry Lenfest turned it over to the Philadelphia Foundation.

Can a charitable foundation with deep local ties and no journalistic roots be motivated to generate sophisticated independent investigative reporting? (Spotlight emphasizes Globe editor Marty Baron's fresh perspective as an outsider — he's new to both the Globe and Boston’s old-boy Catholic network, and Jewish, to boot.) When our large print journalism institutions have finally succumbed to the Internet, who with sufficiently meaningful resources will speak truth to power?

I suspect some viable economic model will be found. But the search may require at least as much ingenuity and persistence as that displayed by the Globe reporters in Spotlight.

For Armen Pandola's review, click here.