Spotlight Essay

The movie Spotlight depicts a team of investigative journalist from the Boston Globe that in the mid-eighties uncover a decades long pattern of child sexual abuse by priests of the Catholic Church in Boston. The spotlight team is composed of four investigative journalist tasked with the story. A newly assigned Boston Globe editor Marty Baron insisted on investigating on a prior written article on the same newspaper, which reported on lawsuits concerning to a priest allegedly involved in sexual abuse. The team began an investigation into the priest who had been allowed to keep preaching after his abuse of young parishioners had been uncovered and kept secret for over thirty years. It turned out that was just the beginning. After the spotlight team learned that a judge had sealed the court documents to prevent the personnel records of the priest from going public, the team became determined to investigate further …show more content…
The film makes the surprising or not so surprising point that it took an outsider, the new editor from the Miami Herald, to notice what the locals did not, maybe because they could not, or maybe even they would not because of fear of bringing shame upon their own town. In the film many aspects explained in the “The culture of Journalism” chapter of the textbook are shown. One the most important is the Code of Ethics a journalist should live by, telling the story in the most accurate way, by treating everyone with respect and to feel accountable to their readers by being free of any obligation to an entity. That is how the Spotlight team released the story, they never put the story above the victims or below the church. The conversation among the public always starts after the story is released, and in a sense is because they have opened up another door into