So last week I talked about All the President's Men, and highlighted that plus Spotlight and The Post as some of my favorite movies about journalism. This week, lo and behold, Spotlight shows up on HBO Max, so with my endorsement from last week still fresh in mind, I decided to watch it again.
Now, whereas last week I talked about All the President's Men's distinctively 70s filmmaking, with Spotlight I'm struck by the legwork, as I put it then. The reporters on the Spotlight team are shown chasing down leads, frequently by showing up at people's homes and offices, working the phones, working the legal records. All of these are things they tried to drill into us at journalism school, though I'm not sure how well it all penetrated, at least for me, in all cases.
Certainly the stories I wrote, for the most part, weren't as important as the one in Spotlight, dealing with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the institutional coverup surrounding that abuse. I worked on one crime story, involving a robbery that turned into a deadly shooting, and made it all the way to the intensive care unit where the victim was being treated, before my and my partner's nerve failed us and we couldn't bring ourselves to hassle the victim's relative who was sitting by his bedside... certainly not for some stupid story for school that only our professor would ever see.
My other bite at the journalistic cherry was an investigative piece were another partner and I tried to establish whether the trash incinerator on the other side of the river from Manhattan was burning electronic waste. I had one good success, when I doorstepped the lawyer for the environmental group who'd turned us onto the story; he was quite impressed that after a few days of not being able to fit me in for a call, he found me at his office so he made some time. The rest of the investigation didn't go so well, which is probably one of many things that... I was going to say put me off journalism, but it's probably more accurate to say that it showed certain types of journalism don't necessarily play to my strengths.
The first instance doesn't bother me so much, for the reason I mentioned. The second one does, because when I watch movies like All the President's Men or Spotlight, it feels too bad that I didn't manage a good investigative piece. There were some factors against me, notably the impossibility of confirming something that the environmental lawyer was probably right about but also acting on his own agenda; also, my professor was pretty bad, since her way of teaching journalism was just to tell us to "write it beautifully" but not actually... teach anything. Yet at the end of the day, the failure is my own, and it certainly pushed me away from taking a class in the second semester on how to do investigative stories (I also didn't care for that class's professor, so I'm not super sorry I missed it).
Still, I fancy that I know enough about the legwork the reporters in Spotlight are doing that I can imagine what it would have been like for me to work on something like that. At the same time, I know from later experience that the pressure of getting things in quickly doesn't always work for me: I believe, or my work experience has led me to believe, that I'm better at putting together an analysis of what's going on, explaining why it's important rather than giving a running commentary on the latest developments.
What I just wrote may be true, or it may be the reason I give for why I didn't do so well in rapid-fire journalism. The job I had after J-school was probably not unreasonable in asking for 2-3 short pieces per day, but I couldn't seem to get them right, even though there were some interviews or discussions that I remember being proud of. On the other hand, a big problem was also trying to avoid rewriting all the press releases that came across my desk.
Something else that Spotlight emphasizes is the changing nature of journalism, into which I found myself ejected from J-school upon graduation. It takes place in 2001, and starts with a new editor taking over at The Boston Globe amid the declining circulation and revenues that came with the rise of the internet. The movie itself came out in 2015, so there was more than a decade's worth of further destruction of the newspaper industry, but the issues raised in the film are still valid now: advertising on the internet killed classifieds in papers, which was the real lifeblood of the industry. This led to the need to attract more eyeballs, which meant dumbing down headlines and subject matter.
To the film's credit, the new editor isn't portrayed as a marketer who's only interested in the bottom line, and he's shown pushing the Spotlight team to give the abuse story more prominence. But it's striking to see the seeds of all the things that have hurt journalism up to now, including a shot of an AOL billboard right outside the Globe's offices. The movie doesn't mention social media or fake news or polarization, but it came out late enough that you can fill in those blanks yourself.
Unlike All the President's Men, they do make movies like Spotlight now, which is a good thing, because it's important to show journalists as more than the amoral sleaze bags that some (predominantly rightwing) filmmakers like to portray. It's also good that the movie shows the legwork, the long hours and the long calls, that should characterize good reporting.
And who knows - maybe one day I'll manage to do something along those lines myself.
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