T he just-released movie Spotlight is about a Boston Globe
investigative reporting team circa 2001-02 that uncovered and documented a
vast network of child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Church that had
been on-going for decades. More to the point, Spotlight revealed the
institutional rot at the very top of the Boston Catholic Church hierarchy,
led by then-Cardinal Bernard Law — which marinated church personnel in a code
of secret atrocious behavior enabled by systematic lying and deception. In
effect, the church gave permission to its foot-soldiers, the parish priests,
to engage in whatever sexual antics they wished to, with a tacit promise to
shield them from the reach of the courts. The civil authorities of Boston,
heavily Catholic due to Boston’s demographics, assisted the church by
throwing up every legal obstacle they could to deter the victims and their
advocates in the search for justice — and to put an end to the predation of
children by priests.
That was the story that Spotlight told, and it did that very
economically, without grandstanding. But the movie had another message for
me, as someone who has been involved in the media going back more than forty
years when I was an investigative newspaper reporter myself. The
message was that the institutional support for great journalism that allowed
the Globe’s Spotlight reporting team to do its job is now
gone-baby-gone. All the newspapers in the USA, and even the TV and radio news
networks, are running these days on skeleton crews. At least that is true of
the old flagship organizations such as the Boston Globe and CNN.
They just don’t have the reporters out in the field. The front-page
or flatscreen interface that the public sees conceals ghost organizations
that barely have the reporting resources and the reach to discover what is
actually going on in the world.
The dying newspapers — and they really are on life-support at this point,
including the Globe and The New York Times — can’t pay
teams of reporters like the Spotlight crew to work through years-long
investigations. But what the movie also ought to remind us is that the
hierarchical competence at such an enterprise, the layers of editors who know
what they are doing and understand the boundaries and conventions of their
own society, is also disastrously AWOL in the new Wowee-Zowie era of instant
cell-phone networking, Facebook, and Instagram. In a word, leadership has
been made to seem dispensable.
What gets left out of the story, as usual, are the diminishing returns of
technology. In the news business — that is, the business of informing society
what is actually going on — that blowback is leaving the public not just
uninformed or misinformed, but additionally clueless about what they have
lost. The result is a society increasingly shaped by delusion and paralysis.
For example, The New York Times has gone from being the “newspaper
of record” to being the leading dispenser of wishful thinking by a feminized
political Left preoccupied with feelings over truth. (This, by the way, helps
to account for the remnant media’s hatred of Vladimir Putin, a leader who
doesn’t apologize for acting one like one. And, of course, a man.) The Old
Gray Lady is also reduced to overt cheerleading for its avatar (Monday’s
lead op-ed: HILLARY
CLINTON — How I’d Rein In Wall Street Ha!), and making excuses for our
grift-and rackets-based polity (Paul
Krugman: The Not-So-Bad Economy Ha Ha Ha!).
At the local level, the news situation is simply pathetic. The surviving
local newspapers are little more than bulletin boards for news releases from
interested parties. They’ve fired all their reporters. Soon the papers will all
be gone and the vaunted wondrous Internet will be little more than a
grapevine and a rumor mill. The “cloud” that everybody thinks is so marvelous
will look more and more like an epochal fog — and we’ll be lost in
it. These are the wages of our techno-narcissism, a society now marinating in
cluelessness the way the Catholic church, as depicted in Spotlight,
marinates in pederasty and deceit. It is frankly hard to see a way out of the
cultural predicament. Two things, at least, are necessary to break out of
this hall of mirrors: men acting like honorable men, and hierarchies of
leadership with the integrity to actually lead. For now, the USA is not
interested in those things.
