Paying Tribute to the Reporting That Exposed Priest Sex Abuse

By Roy J. Harris Jr.
The Patriot-Ledger
January 25, 2012

http://www.patriotledger.com/opinions/opinions_columnists/x1870691377/Paying-tribute-to-the-reporting-that-exposed-priest-sex-abuse

Jan. 25, is not a particularly remarkable day for most journalists, except among the top editors of America's newspapers and news websites.

It is the deadline for submitting entries for the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious awards for U.S. journalism, dating to 1917. That's 95 years of honoring great reporting, along with accomplishment in arts and letters acknowledged by the non-journalism branch of the prizes.

As it happens, I'm in Los Angeles talking today to classes at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism. My topic: what I consider the best example of Pulitzer-winning team investigative reporting since Watergate. That reporting, in the Boston Globe, began running 10 years ago this month.

On Jan. 6, 2002, the Globe first vividly documented the Catholic Church hierarchy's cover-up of priests who sexually abused young parishioners – igniting a scandal still resonating around the U.S. and the world. Rightly, most of the anniversary's attention so far has focused on the progress made by abuse victims and their families, and the way the issue still resonates within the Church.

But as a journalist who has studied the nine decades of special reporting that has won the top Pulitzer – the prize for public service – I am intent on keeping alive the legacy of the remarkable journalism that first called the Church's abuses to our attention.

The news business historically does a poor job of telling the "back stories" behind its best work – a shortcoming that deprives future journalists of insights about how the media operates at peak. Few such analyses of great reporting are regularly studied by journalism students, the way Harvard Business School draws on cases of corporate success. ("Reporting an Explosive Truth," a journalism-school case based on the Globe's work, has reached only 200 students in 13 classes, for example, since being introduced by Columbia University in recent years.)

Most-studied is the Washington Post's Watergate coverage, which won the 1973 public service Pulitzer for the Post. It is perhaps so popular because "All the President's Men," the book by lead reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, along with the 1976 movie, have elevated that example almost to the position of legend.

Ask Woodward himself to discuss more-recent journalism worthy of study, though, and he readily points to the Globe's Church coverage. "I worry sometimes that we don't pick the really hard, important targets that have much broader implications," he told me several years after the Globe broke its stories. "That's where I take my hat off to the Globe, because there's no harder target than the Catholic Church."

It has been noted with some irony that the first of the Globe's 2002 stories appeared on in the day in the Church calendar that celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany. In a sense, my own personal journalistic epiphany began that day, as well.

On that day I was just one more shocked reader – although the reporter in me was especially curious about what the Globe didn't say: How had this article, so full of detail about defrocked priest John Geoghan and his victims, been developed by the Spotlight Team in the first place?

Several months later, though, I found myself commissioned to write a book on the history of the public service Pulitzer. As I continued to be impressed by the Globe's continuing Church coverage, it occurred to me that this could well be the winner when the 2003 Pulitzers were announced the next April.

As "Pulitzer Day" approached, I even made plans to be in the Globe newsroom. I saw the celebration when it did, in fact, win for public service. And I quietly began lining up interviews with Spotlight leader Walter V. Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll -- whose names had been in the Jan. 6 "byline box" -- along with editor Martin Baron, then-managing editor for projects Ben Bradlee Jr., and others involved.

The interviews allowed me to reconstruct the circuitous five-month path from the first serious suggestion that the Spotlight Team pursue the Geoghan story, and the newspaper's successful attempt to unseal court records in his legal case, to that first story. (Along the way, the intense reporting would be interrupted by the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, after which Spotlight members were reassigned temporarily to terrorism-related topics.) Eventually, the two chapters I wrote about the Globe became my book's centerpiece – and a yardstick against which I measured other examples of Pulitzer-winning journalism.

There were few that could compare, however.

Last year I taught an Emerson College journalism class called "Impact Reporting," where many of the Globe's current and former staffers discussed their roles in the Church coverage. My students told me it was the highlight of the semester for them.

Elizabeth Mehren, a Boston University journalism professor and former Los Angeles Times reporter, isn't surprised. In the spring 2003 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports magazine she wrote of the Globe's coverage: "Consider the elements: power, corruption, intrigue, tragedy, betrayal, money – and an institution that dates back 2,000 years. The villains are despicable. Meanwhile, the proverbial quest for truth and justice – what brought us all into this line of endeavor, after all – is always at the forefront."