We went to
see the movie “Spotlight” last week, and like nearly everyone else thought it
was terrific. Viewing it from the perspective of a former newspaperman, I
couldn’t help but think about it in the context of today’s news business.
The film
tells the story of a team of four reporters from the Boston Globe who, in 2001-02, uncovered the widespread pattern of
pedophilia by priests in the Boston diocese and the systematic degree to which
the Catholic Church covered it up. It took a year of attacking the story from
multiple angles before the paper finally had it nailed down and ready to print.
A little
more than a decade later, things have changed. Four reporters no longer
constitute a special investigative team. In too many cases, four reporters is
the whole newsroom, and that obviously has a limiting effect on any news
operation’s ability to investigate a large, complex story.
When It Takes More Than a Tweet
This has
been a while coming, but I could see it on the horizon when I left the business
more than 20 years ago. I vividly remember a conversation I had toward the end
with a corporate executive whose office was far, far away from the town our
newspaper served. Arguing against budget cuts, I made the point that when a
reporter is cut from the news staff, that amounts to two to three hundred
stories a year that don’t get covered.
“That’s the
old way of thinking,” the executive replied, strongly implying that there was
something wrong with me for not being able to figure out how to generate professionally
written news stories without any people to research and write them.
What “Spotlight”
depicts so well is the phenomenal amount of hard work and ingenuity that goes
into running a story to earth. It takes an understanding of the wide range of
ways of getting information (from interviews to poring over documents until
your eyes glaze over) that non-professionals simply don’t have. Sure, anybody
can tweet a photo or a putative factoid, but a complex story that someone
doesn’t want told? That’s another matter.
Making Sense out of Chaos
Seeing the
movie shortly after the terror attacks in Paris brought home another point. It
takes both professionalism and time to make sense out of a huge breaking story
like the Paris attacks. But we have become a society that wants to wait for
nothing, hence a much more partially (and dangerously) informed society.
Writing in
the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, a
technology columnist, noted that the internet, and Twitter in particular, in
the wake of a big, messy story like the terror attacks, is a maelstrom of
knee-jerk opinion and misinformation (slightly paraphrased).
The great
CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow once said, “A lie can get halfway around the world
before the truth can get its pants on.” Instant communication has made that
situation even worse, and I have to wonder how many people will remember things
about Paris years from now that simply aren’t true, but that came out in the
immediate aftermath without proper vetting.
I agree
with Manjoo. If you really want to be informed about a story like Paris, turn
off the TV, don’t look at the internet, and wait a day until the facts have
been sorted out and the worst misinformation has receded into the background.
As if
anyone will do that.
