Journalism has always been a big, sloppy business in which, for warmth and succor, the highest principle curls up alongside the most shameless shilling. Most of the time we barely think about the contradictions. Once in a while they yank our collar.
On Monday night the Headline Club sponsored an advance screening of the new movie Spotlight at the Lake Street Screening Room. Spotlight is a newspaper movie: it tells the story of the 2002 Boston Globe investigation into decades of pedophilia within Boston’s priesthood that the Catholic archdiocese tolerated and concealed.
“Someone asked McCarthy why he didn’t throw in a title card saying the reporters had won the Pulitzer Prize. I put it to the reporters, and they said no. They said, ‘That’s not why we did it. We did it for the facts that you represented there, and those are the facts that we’re most proud of.’ What mattered, in the end, was the work.”
