Santoriello Spotlight Paper

The movie “Spotlight” covers The Boston Globe’s spotlight team that does extensive investigative reporting on some sensitive issues. Perhaps no issue was more sensitive than the team’s report on the systematic abuse by the Catholic Church in a very Roman-Catholic Boston area. Within the movie the reporters are seen employing three different types of reporting skills: Interviewing sources, using personal observation, and using stored sources of information. 

More than anything else, the most basic form of a reporter gathering information is simply interviewing others. Throughout the movie the group talk to many sources both on the record and off to garner information for their story. For example, the group as a whole interviewed Phil Saviano, the head of SNAPP, for names and information on other victims of abuse to confirm accounts of the priests abusing children. Saviano was an in-person interview, but Mike Rezendes was able to use his personal observation to meet Mitch Garabedian on his way to work and trap him in the elevator to ask him a few questions.  

Also an important part of the story was the victim’s testimonies. The team made an important decision to meet the victims in comfortable places like their homes or sharing a nice meal with them to make them at ease while talking about a difficult subject.  The group also talked to sources over the phone, like Richard Sipe, the ex-priest who did research as a psychoanalyst on the abuse. Sipe was able to provide a ballpark number on the amount of priest in Boston which prompted the team to change their approach in the next category of acquiring information, stored sources. 

The team tirelessly poured through directories of all the parishes in Boston for the past 30 years looking for priests who were transferred following a possible abuse between the priest and child. The Spotlight team also searched and applied to see sealed records that proved Cardinal Law knew about the incidents but did nothing about them. On a tip from Garabedian, Rezendes was able to view public letters that would prove Law’s guilt before any other paper could get their hands on them. Rezendes fought off backlash and silly red tape from the courthouse to finally get the documents copied in order to bring back to the office. Finally, the team also searched their own databases in the morgue to find out what had already been reported on and where they may have had shortcomings. 

The final category discussed in class and seen in “Spotlight” was the use of the team’s personal observation to drive the story further. Most likely the most important use of personal observation was the team realizing that all the priests that were linked to sexual abuse were listed as on sick leave. This helped the team to identify potential abusive priests more quickly and get the story done on deadline. 

In short, “Spotlight” is a very realistic and good example of what real reporting looks like in news. Granted the story itself provides a very good plot for a movie, but the director and actors also provided such a detailed description and example of how to properly investigate and produce a story.