Journalism is more boring than you think
Spreadsheets, phone calls, knocking on doors: “Spotlight” demystifies the exciting side of reporting.
At first it was a story of a couple of pedophile priests in Boston. After a year of talking to victims the Boston Globe’s reporters identified more than 200 cases of child abuse. But it was not only Boston. It was the whole country, it happened all over the whole world. This, the systematic child abuse by priests and how they were protected by the Catholic church, is the plot of the film “Spotlight”, which just won an Academy award. It is based on a true story.
“Spotlight was bigger than Watergate. It was not only the US. It has an international perspective,” says Sascha Pfeiffer.
She was part of the actual Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team which uncovered the story. Pfeiffer spoke to journalism students after the movie was screened at the Baruch college in Manhattan last week. The movie gives a pretty accurate insight of their work, says Pfeiffer, even though she was very suspicious whether Hollywood would sensationalize the story.
According to Pfeiffer, the directors only made slight adaptions: An angry E-mail in realy life was a heatedly face-to-face debate in the movie; also did the reporters not always meet sources in bars or diners, but spent most of their time at their desk — but showing all this would have made a pretty boring movie, says Pfeiffer.
Even more boring? Despite this movie is praised by most, and of course every journalist I know loves it, I was surprised to find many of my friends who watched it were quite bored. Don’t get me wrong: Nobody denies that Spotlight’s investigative work was important and valuable, but watching a bunch of journalists sliding their rulers through spreadsheets and trying to get access to files is, let’s be frank, not very exciting.
The movie demystifies the cliché of the all-time-exciting life of journalists: This isn’t a fun job, especially if you work on a topic like this. “Spotlight” shows the unsexy, strenuous life full of research in solitude, microwave-heated pizzas and the rare leisure activity of jogging to the newsroom.
In “Spotlight”, you see reporters knocking on doors, being on the phone or behind a spreadsheet. All they do is digging into data, trying to get sources to talk (and trying again and trying again) and validating the facts, . . .
“Many times family and friends who saw the movie said: Now we actually understand what it is you’re doing,” says Sascha Pfeiffer.
And this movie is not just about the success of journalism. Actually, it is a very good example of the failures of journalism: the Boston globe got a tip 8 years earlier but never followed up on it.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around (. . . ) all of you have done some very good reporting here. Reporting that I believe is going to have an immediate and considerable impact on our readers. For me, this kind of story is why we do this,” says Boston globe’s editor on chief Marty Baron in one scene.
And even if you end up uncovering something as tremendously important as the Spotlight-team, rewards and change often come late. The Globe’s investigative team received a Pulitzer price for their work, and this year the movie received an Academy award. But much more importantly, a decade-long scandal of kids being molested by priests was revealed and taken to court. So for Pfeiffer, this is still the best job in the world.
“This is life of school in the best way”, she says Pfeiffer.
