Award winning-film Spotlight was an eye opener for quite a few people when it came out. I was already aware of the situation, but there are probably a lot of people who weren’t aware. This movie is about a group of journalists working in the Spotlight department of the Boston Globe trying to research on the possibility of priests in Boston molesting young children, and the police and the church shoving it under the rug for years.
As the story develops, the journalists learn that there could be up to 90 priests in Boston molesting children, and they have a very difficult time finding information since most of the cases were dismissed. The team was finally able to release a story at the beginning of 2002, and this led to tons of cases throughout the U.S. and the world of priests molesting children was discovered. This, of course, is based off of true events.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around. I can’t speak to what happened before I arrived, but all of you have done some very good reporting here. Reporting that I believe is going to have an immediate and considerable impact on our readers. For me, this kind of story is why we do this.” This was said by Marty Baron, the new editor of the Boston Globe, and I think this describes why it’s so important to these journalists.
This movie shows you how hard it is to be a journalist. These people gave up so much time and put in so much effort to crack this story open. One of the journalists stopped going to church with her grandmother because of everything she was discovering. One of the journalists talked about how his wife isn’t happy with how much time he is spending working on this story, and it is probably affecting his marriage.
Through doing this, the journalists gained experience in doing extensive research. They also couldn’t let this be swept under the carpet for any longer, and by releasing this story when they did, they helped so many people. This movie shows the audience the behind the scenes action of a very important moment in religious, political, and journalistic history.
