UNITED STATES
Georgetown Voice
By Brian McMahon on November 20, 2015
Over and over again, taking responsibility proves to be a challenging task for human beings and their institutions. Individuals go to great lengths to deny and conceal; as a result, others must go even further to unpack the truths that threaten our communities and livelihoods. Investigative journalism is a powerful medium, one that has condemned and exposed individuals, institutions, and governments. In the film world, depictions of investigative reporting have often cast the men and women behind the stories as heroes, as renegades working outside of and above whatever corruption they seek to uncover.
With the release of the movie Spotlight, which details The Boston Globe’s investigation of the Massachusetts Catholic sex abuse scandal, director Tom McCarthy has graduated from the mold that defines iconic journalism films such as All the President’s Men, the critically acclaimed film following two journalists as they exposed the Watergate Scandal. Instead of glorifying the paper’s reporters, McCarthy and co-screenwriter Josh Singer attempt to portray them as they were: intelligent but flawed individuals, capable of fantastic reporting but also of missing or neglecting crucial information.
Marty Baron, Executive Editor of The Washington Post, views Spotlight as more aware of the realities of investigative reporters. In an email to the Voice, Baron wrote, “I’m not an expert on Hollywood depictions of journalists. Generally, however, they seem to depict us as crusaders or as rascals, mostly the latter. The beauty of this film is that it recognizes that journalists, even as in memorable scenes, collaboration reigns supreme, individual senses of purpose augmented by a collective thirst they can do a lot of good, have their flaws. And sometimes those flaws mean we fail to pursue stories as energetically or as deeply as we should.”
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