Let’s start with excerpts from the movie review of “Spotlight” by the New York Times:
“Review: In ‘Spotlight,’ The Boston Globe Digs Up the Catholic Church’s Dirt”
“Directed by Tom McCarthy from a script he wrote with Josh Singer and based closely on recent history, “Spotlight” is a gripping detective story and a superlative newsroom drama, a solid procedural that tries to confront evil without sensationalism. Taking its name from the investigative team that began pursuing the sex-abuse story in 2001, the film focuses on both the human particulars and the larger political contours of the scandal and its uncovering…
“The Globe itself (owned by The New York Times Company when the film takes place) is shown to be an imperfect institution. The people who work inside it are decidedly fallible — as prone to laziness, confusion and compromise as anyone else. Before 2001 — with some exceptions, notably in the work of the columnist Eileen McNamara (played here in a few cursory scenes by Maureen Keiller) — the paper overlooked both the extent of the criminality in the local church and the evidence that the hierarchy knew what was going on. The Spotlight reporters and editors are pursuing a big, potentially career-making scoop. At the same time, they are atoning for previous lapses and trying to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that is as integral to the functioning of a newspaper as the zealous pursuit of the truth. “What took you so long?” is a question they hear more than once.”
Actually the New York Times had only acquired the Globe about seven years earlier. (it subsequently sold it). The Globe had been given the story with ample evidence by at least two sources in earlier decades, but had ignored the information.
Then comes a new owner and followed several years later by a new managing editor, the former without deep roots in Boston and the latter from Florida and elsewhere and a Jew.
Often it takes an outsider to see, understand, not be intimidated, and so speak out about what is happening.
The massive looting of the public trough now and for the future through the give away of the billion dollar Lancaster General Hospital, the development of the Convention Center and the introduction of the CRIZ program is nothing new to the constrained staff of LNP. But only if this generation of the Steinman family sells the newspaper to a credible news organization will there be a possibility of Lancaster’s own ‘spotlight’ being turned on these and other establishment abuses.
