ILLINOIS
Daily Northwestern
Mariana Alfaro, Web Editor
April 20, 2016 •
Journalists Walter Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for their Boston Globe series that uncovered Roman Catholic Church sexual abuse cases, said they never expected to discover such deep networks of corruption when they first started working on the story. Last year, their work was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight.”
Robinson and Pfeiffer spoke Tuesday night to about 250 students after a screening of the film hosted by A&O Productions and Studio 22. During the Q&A session, moderated by Medill Prof. Mei-Ling Hopgood, Robinson and Pfeiffer spoke about their experiences writing the story and collaborating with the film’s actors and creators more than a decade after.
“This may be … perhaps the first major investigative story of the Internet age,” Robinson said. “It went viral. Within a day or two we were getting phone calls and emails literally from all over the world … the story just exploded.”
In the film, Michael Keaton plays Robinson, who led the Boston Globe’s 2002 coverage of the scandal, which resulted in international outrage against the Catholic Church and the resignation of Boston’s Archbishop. Rachel McAdams plays Pfeiffer, a portrayal the journalist said was “uncanny.”
Pfeiffer said the film reminded her of the power of Hollywood because she continues to receive emails from viewers worldwide who might have been unaware of the scandal before, even though the story was published more than a decade ago. Even the Catholic Church, she said, had a more positive reaction to the film than to the original story.
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