UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Kevin Walsh
Creator: MyMediaDiary.com, Media Educator, Video Producer of “Digging Detroit”
Michael Keaton’s character, Walter “Robbie” Robinson, in the newly-released Spotlight, is seeking Boston Globe confirmation of the Archdiocese cover-up for 70 priests involved in child molestation. He passes the list to his longtime friend and attorney, “We all knew something was going on.”
His friend kicks him out of his house and then follows Robbie into the street and asks him why he didn’t do anything — if he knew something was going on.
Robbie pauses and can only say, “I don’t know.”
Spotlight ‘s portrayal of the 2001 investigation by the Globe’s Spotlight unit (Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) is an excellent snapshot of an entire city looking the other way. When a representative of a survivor’s group brings his box of evidence to the Globe office and is asked, “Why now? Why hasn’t this been a bigger story before?” he informs them that he had already sent the box years earlier. The collective head-hanging matches that after his earlier question, if they were Catholic (not practicing).
“I don’t know” accurately sums up America’s foggy morals as it addresses refugees, gun-violence and college sexual assault while struggling, perhaps, to re-grow its conscience.
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