‘Spotlight’ Illuminates What Journalism Needs, What America Stands to Lose
Spotlight is a true-to-life drama that gives moviegoers a nitty-gritty look inside how a team of investigative reporters from The Boston Globe broke the story of sex abuses in the Catholic Church, a scandal that rattled the Vatican and earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
A review in the Los Angeles Times calls the film “the All the President’s Men for our time, and, boy, do we need it now.”
Folks at the Times would know. Under Tribune Publishing, the newsroom has shrunk considerably in recent years, and right now, executives are considering buyouts that are expected to result in more job losses.
In the simplest terms possible, the problem is that people don’t want to pay for all the news they click on—and eventually, you get what you pay for.
“The one thing we know is people need to pay for their news—something that good shouldn’t be free,” Spotlight director and cowriter Tom McCarthy told reporters at a Los Angeles junket recently. “I don’t want to eat free sushi. I want to pay, and I want to pay good money for it.”
Set in 2002, Spotlight takes place at a moment in journalism when the news business was changing—in a revealing scene, one of the journalists on the team notes that readers can get more information on the Internet if the newspaper prints a Web address, a newfangled concept at the time. In 2002, there were 54,700 journalists working at newspapers across the country. By 2013, that number had plummeted to 36,700 nationally, according to research from the American Society for News Editors.
“Tens of thousands of reporters have lost their jobs,” McCarthy said. “We need reporters. We need boots on the ground. These aggregate sites aren’t enough.”
Journalism has woven its way through much of McCarthy’s career; he memorably played the role of a shady reporter who fabricated interviews during season 5 of The Wire. The Globe journalists, who all agreed to let the story of their prize-winning work be told, said that at first they didn’t understand how McCarthy and filmmakers could make the patently unglamorous work of knocking on doors and poring over reams of files into a good movie.
No car chases, no explosions, no sexy romances—this didn’t seem like the sort of stuff Hollywood could get behind, said Sacha Pfeiffer, who is portrayed by Rachel McAdams in the film.
“They took what in real life was often tedious drudgery, slow work, and they made it engrossing. Like, a spreadsheet that took three slow weeks is two riveting minutes of the movie—and that shows how talented they are,” Pfeiffer told reporters.
McAdams’ pleated khakis have earned praise for being some of the least flattering-yet-true-to-newsrooms casting in the film, but that’s just one tiny facet that was on point. Too often, journalists are goofy personas in movies—think Amy Schumer’s boozy turn in Trainwreck, or Kate Hudson’s dippy antics in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
“Movies and television are often a caricature of what they think we do, and that rings hollow to us. This movie really captures what a day in the life of being a reporter is, and what you can accomplish when you have the time and the resources,” Pfeiffer said.
Fellow reporter Michael Rezendes, played by Mark Ruffalo, says part of why he was convinced to participate in the film was “the sincerity of producers to a story about the importance of investigative reporting at a time when investigative reporting is under siege at a lot of institutions—not at the Globe, but others.”
That crumbling fabric of American journalism is a familiar story in newsrooms big and small all over America—one that the makers of Spotlight hope they can get viewers to really care about. (Disclosure: The film was produced by TakePart’s parent company, Participant Media.)
For his part, cowriter Josh Singer subscribes to three newspapers—The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and The New York Times—and hopes the film’s viewers will be inspired to support their local journalists, and that innovators or philanthropists will step in to save the Fourth Estate.
“What we’d like to do is to remind people how important this sort of journalism is and push people to look for a new solution,” Singer said at the junket. “I certainly hope this sparks some conversation and sparks some revitalization.”
Spotlight opens in select theaters in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston this weekend.
Related stories on TakePart:
• How P.R. Is Killing Journalism
• Numbers Don’t Lie: See Where Women Stand in Media
• When Government Transparency Falters, FOIA Shines Light on Major News
Original article from TakePart
