“Not an Ounce of Hollywood Bullshit”: A Narrative Analysis of News Media Coverage of Spotlight’s Oscar Win

Abstract

A narrative analysis was conducted of news media coverage of the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight from January 1, 2015, until June 1, 2016, with a focus on how journalists, film critics, and commentators invoked the history of investigative reporting—and of investigative reporting on film—in evaluating Spotlight and the significance of the journalism-related issues it raised. Even as the narrative asks the reader to revisit the “heroic journalist” myth, its elements mitigate against endorsement: the field’s financial distress, the focus on “grunt work,” the desire of the film’s creators to honor journalism’s past, the impression that journalists had been cordoned off somewhere until the film reintroduced us to them, and the Spotlight team begrudgingly accepting Hollywood’s demands—even the repeated comparisons to All the President’s Men—coalesce to negate the film’s potential to remind us of the need for aggressive, uncompromising investigative reporting and to affirm the myth of the dogged investigative journalist.

Keywords

narrative analysis Academy Awards journalism on film investigative reporting

Spotlight, the celebrated feature film based on the Boston Globe’s long-running investigation of pedophilia by priests and its cover-up by the Archdiocese of Boston, won the 2015 Academy Award for best picture, the first journalism-themed picture to capture that honor since 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement. In addition to continuing the dialogue about a serious issue, the film underscored the value to society of dogged investigative reporting, following in the thematic footsteps of All the President’s Men, The Insider, and Good Night and Good Luck, among others. This essay reports a narrative analysis of how journalists, film critics, and commentators invoked the history of investigative reporting—and of investigative reporting on film—in evaluating Spotlight and the significance of the journalism-related issues it raised. It seeks to answer these questions: What does the narrative emerging from coverage suggest that journalists believe Spotlight tells us about their work, its impact, and the state of the field? How does Spotlight invoke and does it affirm the mythology of investigative journalism seen most famously in All the President’s Men? Does coverage of Spotlight’s success reinforce the belief that investigative journalism is still important or does it suggest that the craft may in fact be losing its “swashbuckling calling card?” (Marks, 2016). Before attempting to answer these questions, I provide a snapshot of the environment in which the nation revisited and continues to be affected by the compelling work of Spotlight’s journalists.

State of the Field

Journalism by many accounts is in crisis. Newspapers have closed across the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of individuals employed as journalists has dropped by 10% since 2007 (“The Decline,” 2017, p. 48). One survey found that being a newspaper reporter is considered by the public to be “the worst job in America” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9). Once dominant news organizations now find themselves “chasing passionate niches” (Tanz, 2017, p. 48) which are often populated by those who hold, sometimes zealously, a particular worldview. Social media have forced editors and news directors to cede, or at least share, the gatekeeping role with so-called citizen journalists whose work is viewed as being at least as credible as that produced by professional reporters (Carr, Barnidge, Lee, & Tsang, 2014).

Yet life for those who believe in the adage that journalists must “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” has had its positive moments. Journalists have rallied around colleagues who have borne the brunt of President Trump’s ongoing effort to cast the news media as the “opposition party” (Morin, 2018) and “enemy of the people” (Wagner & Sonmez, 2018), as when Trump revoked the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after a heated exchange during a November 2018 press conference (Flint, 2018). CNN successfully sued the Administration, claiming revocation of the credentials violated the First Amendment (Flint, 2018). The tumultuous first 2 years of the Trump administration have emboldened journalists and enhanced their public image. “The work we do is once again hip” claimed former 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (quoted in Rieder, 2016, p. 2B). Thus, the time is right for a movie like Spotlight to serve as a new catalyzing myth for that comeback. But do journalists see it that way? As Saltzman (2005) contends, accuracy in depicting journalism is not as significant as the fact that the depiction is “very real in the public mind” (p. 41). The aim of this essay, then, is to enhance understanding “of what the public of a specific era believes about its media and the people in that media” (p. 42). Journalists and the public remain locked in a “love–hate relationship” (Trujillo & Ekdom, 1987, p. 369) stemming from our confusion about the journalist’s role and our distaste for their excesses. Yet as Ehrlich and Saltzman (2015) note, “the myth of the press acting as a force for public good is reinforced by heroes serving democracy and scoundrels paying the price for their sins” (p. 16). Complicating this journey is Bennett and Serrin’s (2005) assertion that today’s journalists, convinced of their own celebrity, are “drawn to the glitter of the Georgetown social circuit and the White House.” Some have “overly stylized and ritualized” the watchdog role (p. 179). Some make a public show of their adversarialism “in pursuit of no cause more noble than that of professional vanity and institutional advantage” (McNair, 2010, p. 11). But the most significant damage done by this chest puffing is that it distracts the public from what investigative journalists believe is their mission.

Acting as the field’s “custodians of conscience” (Glasser & Ettema, 1989, p. 1), the investigative reporter is typically seen as “a breed apart” (Lanosga, Willnat, Weaver, & Houston, 2017, p. 265), driven by “the courage and the will to dig and check, dig and check, and the intelligence and the integrity to see wrongdoing, to define the problem, to discern the import of it and to write about it coherently” (p. 265). We know that investigative journalists tend to be of a more “independent streak of mind” (p. 283) than colleagues in other parts of the field, are better educated, make more money, have earned more prestige, and that they more readily embrace the need to act in an adversarial fashion, especially if they marry that embrace with a desire to shape public affairs and confidence in the media’s ability to sway public opinion. Many, however, believe that ability is limited and therefore focus on working with officials to bring about change (p. 284).

With varying degrees of success, investigative reporters play a complicated role in the “crafting of public morality,” as Condit (1987) explains. They “are called upon not so much to maintain as to produce standards of moral judgment” but are seemingly “denied by the canons of objectivity the opportunity to explicitly make and, more important, analyze and defend such judgments” (Glasser & Ettema, 1989, p. 3). As part of their “ongoing moral relationship” (p. 9) with readers, some demur, claiming that they are only exercising news judgment when they call attention to corruption. Yet in the exercise of their “curative powers” (p. 15), investigative journalists “transform moral claims into empirical claims so that, ultimately, the moral standards used to appraise the transgression appear as empirically unambiguous as the evidence used to document its existence” (Glasser & Ettema, p. 10). They are important contributors “to the process by which” society’s “moral order may be defined and developed as well as simply reinforced” (p. 15).

The Watergate Myth

Thus, only by examining the “linguistic and cultural resources” from which coverage of Spotlight was built can we assess how journalists persuaded readers that the film and the response to it is something “that can be told about” (Manoff, 1987, p. 226) and that their take is valid—a “common recollection” (Nerone & Wartella, 1989, p. 85) that enables us to recall events without having experienced them (Kitch, 1999, p. 123). From extensive news coverage often emerges “a confirming, reinforcing version” of society (Fiske & Hartley, 1978, pp. 85–86), or in this case, of journalism. Lule (2001) defines myth as a “sacred, societal story that draws on archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models for human life” (p. 15). Even though, as Barthes (1957) famously argued, myths are “at once true and unreal (p. 239),” we invoke them to understand and to explain events. R. Campbell (1991) claimed myths offer “the possibility of confronting and suspending the conflicts and contradictions of everyday life” (p. 137). Over time and with repeated tellings, they coalesce into “Common Sense, Right Reason, the Norm, General Opinion,” as Barthes (1977, p. 165) explained.

The Watergate Myth

Journalism’s most enduring myth revolves around how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting for the Washington Post caused President Richard Nixon to resign in August 1974. “This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might,” Michael Schudson (1995, p. 143) claims. This riveting detective story (R. Campbell, 1991, p. 45) amplified by the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, which was based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book, purportedly compelled thousands of young people to attend journalism school, caused news organizations to leap headlong into investigative reporting, turned the White House press corps adversarial, and caused journalists to embrace celebrity and become obsessed with the private lives of public figures (Schudson, 1995, pp. 148–149). The movie typified journalism-themed movies of the 1970s and 1980s that portrayed reporters “as enmeshed with political and economic power” (Ehrlich & Saltzman, 2015, p. 10).

In fact, enrollment in journalism programs had doubled between 1967 and 1972. Moreover, many journalists only acted in an adversarial fashion during press conferences and then only to promote the craft. Woodward and Bernstein’s celebrity brought condemnation from colleagues because it produced a tendency in reporters to see Watergate in minor acts of corruption. Any Watergate-inspired increase in the willingness of news executives to ramp up investigative journalism was short-lived (Schudson, 1995, p. 158). Only a handful of Washington reporters pursued the story; Woodward and Bernstein encountered skepticism about their work from Post colleagues and were discouraged from pursuing the story lest the Post lend credence to arguments that it operated with a liberal bias. Their stories, which omitted work by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees, attracted little interest from other newspapers. And it was the New York Times, not Nixon, that was Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee’s primary target after the Times was first to publish the Pentagon Papers (Schudson, 1995, pp. 146–147). With the Post “out of gas” (W. J. Campbell, 2010, p. 123) in the fall of 1972, it was the Times that first reported the payment of “hush money” to the burglars (p. 124) and to call for a special prosecutor. Yet despite these misinterpretations, discrepancies, and omissions, “no other story in American history features the press in so prominent and heroic a role,” Schudson contends, even though at times it feels as though the myth “overwhelms American journalism” (p. 142).

Life in the Interpretive Community

An interpretive community is “a cultural site where meanings are constructed, shared, and reconstructed by members of social groups in the course of everyday life” (Berkowitz & TerKeurst, 1999, p. 125). Like an audience partaking of a text, journalists are “united through their collective interpretations of key public events” (Zelizer, 1993, p. 223). The discourse produced by these interpretations, argues Barbie Zelizer, becomes “a marker of how they see themselves as journalists.” Journalists circulate stories about their performance in covering events as “a standard for judging contemporary action” (p. 224). They come together in a variety of locations—including in coverage of their conduct—to “discuss, consider, and at times challenge the reigning consensus surrounding journalistic practice” (p. 233). Journalists assess their coverage by “doing double time” (Zelizer, 1993, p. 224) in local and durational modes of interpretation. In the local mode, journalists “uphold their own professional ideology” (p. 224) by restating and reemphasizing standards of practice during what might be called “teachable moments” arising from coverage of events. Discussion takes place about possible changes in practice; journalists quickly agree “about the meaning of such change” (p. 225), as Zelizer claims. Reporters emulate exemplary work by colleagues and also “set themselves up in a mitigated association” (p. 225) with actions that violate standards of conduct. In the durational mode, journalists “create their own history of journalism by making each critical incident representative of some greater journalistic dilemma or practice.” Evaluation accomplished during the local mode becomes a broader discussion during which “the whole of journalism is appraised.” Discussion of an event’s coverage is linked “to other incidents that both preceded and followed it” (Zelizer, 1993, p. 226). Time in the durational mode gives dissatisfied journalists “a second chance at making things meaningful” (p. 232).

Thus, Spotlight’s success presented journalists with the opportunity—a “hot moment (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p. 259)”—to celebrate the Spotlight team’s success, to legitimate its work, to discuss the state of the craft, and to reassess the role feature films play in shaping public understanding of investigative journalism. This article navigates the gap between “what is really being suggested about what the press is and has been” by coverage of the film’s success and “what it could and should be” (Ehrlich, 2009).

Spotlight’s Success

Directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight takes its name from the investigative reporting unit established in 1970 at the Boston Globe (Schudson, 1978, p. 189). A film festival favorite in the fall of 2015 (Goldstein, 2015), Spotlight was made for what by Hollywood standards was a paltry $20 million (Spotlight, 2015) and had been rejected 3 times by studios. The film was modestly successful at the box office, bringing in just over $45 million domestically and $98.3 million worldwide (Box Office Mojo, Inc, 2018). It was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two.

McCarthy and Singer conducted interviews with members of the Spotlight team, their editors, and reviewed the more than 600 articles written by the team about molestation by priests and the church’s efforts to cover them up, which included moving the priests to other parishes (Hornaday, 2015, p. E1) and not disclosing to parishioners the reasons for the transfers. To ensure that they turned “a floodlight on the importance” (“‘Spotlight’ Nominated,” 2016) of investigative reporting, Participant Media, one of the movie’s backers, launched a campaign to establish an investigative reporting fellowship. The studio that produced the film, Open Road Films, held screenings for university journalism programs and arranged public appearances by the Spotlight team (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). Their efforts culminated in the Oscar win for best picture.

Method

Texts were obtained through Google News, Lexis-Nexis, and Summon searches conducted in the spring of 2017. In all, 71 articles, accompanying photographs, and audio segments (as well as accompanying transcripts and text) published by mainstream media outlets between January 1, 2015, and June 1, 2016, were analyzed. The search terms “Spotlight movie,” “Spotlight investigative journalism,” and “Spotlight Academy Award” were used. Articles were analyzed only if they contained several paragraphs of discussion about journalism. Compilation of articles continued until saturation was achieved, until enough evidence had been obtained to ground “a sufficient number of arguments of sufficient quality,” as Wood and Kroger (2000, p. 81) recommend. By that point, textual elements recurred with such frequency that gathering of texts was discontinued. “The end point” in gathering texts, they argue, “is not that one stops finding anything new with further cases, but that the analysis of the cases considered to date has been thorough” (p. 81). Thus, the aim here was not to count how often the film, investigative reporting, or All the President’s Men were mentioned; instead, this article explores the “metanarrative” (Berdayes & Berdayes, 1998, p. 113) that coalesced about Spotlight’s potential to be deployed as myth during repeated careful readings of these texts. A “long preliminary soak” (Hall, 1975, p. 15) in the texts was followed by repeated thorough readings. Extensive notes were taken as the analysis progressed; these were carefully reviewed as the narrative elements—objective, setting, characters, narrator, events, temporal relations, causal relations, audience, themes (Foss, 2009, pp. 312–315)—came into focus.

The Centrality of Narrative

Narrative is a tool of organization; stories help us “make sense of the people, places, events, and actions of our lives” (Foss, 2009, p. 307). They enable us to determine “what a particular experience is about and how the various elements of our experience are connected” (p. 307). Journalists craft narratives to explain events to readers—and to attract sufficient numbers of them; they try to find “in the unfamiliar … that which is familiar, a story type made available by culture” (Eason, 1981). In fact, news stories “are already largely written before the journalists take fingers to typewriters or pen to paper” (Hall, 1975 quoted in Fiske, 1987, p. 293). Journalists fit “unruly” (p. 302) facts into one of an existing menu of narratives and borrow from their “mental catalogue” (Berkowitz, 1997, p. 363) of familiar story themes as they craft stories. Meanings developed within these narratives, along with their “compelling” (Condit, 1990, p. 6) vocabulary, drive public understanding. Journalists learn that narratives “bring order to events by making them something that can be told about; they have power because they make the world make sense” (Manoff, 1987, pp. 228–229). Editors and readers expect journalists will explain events in familiar ways. Kitch (2002) claims that a successful news story is one in which “events seem to tell themselves” (p. 296). In fact, as Bruner (1991) asserts, a skilled storyteller is able to persuade listeners that only a single interpretation of a story is possible (p. 9).

The Spotlight Narrative

Following Foss’ (2009) lead, I turn first to a discussion of the Spotlight narrative’s key elements. Narrating the movie’s run to the Oscar were journalists, commentators, and film critics from a variety of news organizations. Their own job-related experiences, positive and negative, permeate the texts. Many waxed nostalgic for a time when newspapers thrived. One (Rea, 2015) emphatically celebrated “the essential role a free press plays in our society.” Even though he cautioned his colleagues about their sentimentalism, A. O. Scott (2015) of the New York Times wrote that his “heart swelled” as he watched Spotlight’s last scene: “the presses humming, the papers stacked and bailed, the trucks rumbling out into the moonlight.”

The main characters in the Spotlight narrative are the Globe reporters and the actors who portrayed them. While the cast played the reporters as “jittery obsessives who put their lives on hold for a story they believe in” (Travers, 2015), Globe reporters were portrayed as caught up in the whirlwind of Oscar season, unaccustomed to fame. McCarthy remarked that the journalists “didn’t know what to do,” so accustomed are they to “working behind the scenes” (Whipp, 2015). McCarthy added, “if they could have pressed a button and dropped through a trap-door on stage, they would have done it” (Whipp, 2015). Promoting Spotlight wore thin, even as they enjoyed their temporary fame. The Spotlight team was “eager to get back to their day jobs,” wrote CNN’s Brian Stelter (2016b), “but not before getting a taste of Hollywood life.”

Paradoxically, the narrative suggests the actors emulated the Globe reporters—the “intrepid (and sometimes scruffy) heroes” (Rea, 2015). Journalists felt it remarkable that Keaton, McAdams, and the other cast members achieved the “rare spectacle of name actors submerging their egos, ceding center stage” to come together as a “unified whole” (Hornaday, 2016). The actors’ extensive preparation—as well as the “level of exactitude that infused the entire production” (Hornaday, 2016)—impressed the journalists. “Not only did they use the reportorial findings of the Spotlight team,” wrote Lorne Manly (2015) of the New York Times, the actors practiced some “journalism of their own to inform every aspect of the script.” They conducted lengthy interviews with the Globe reporters and “combed through” (Manly, 2015) the newspaper’s archives and court documents. Marty Baron (2016) said McCarthy and Singer conducted an “inquiry into our work unlike any I’ve experienced.” Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer remarked to her husband that Rachel McAdams “might have played me too intense and serious” (McPhate, 2016). The actress “peppered her with questions” and emulated her behaviors, right down to how she would “stack her Post-It notes” (Manly, 2015). Rezendes, who bristled at the idea of being shadowed, thought Mark Ruffalo, who played him in the movie, was “incredibly intrusive” (Vaughan, 2015; see also Manly, 2015) during their interviews.

The Oscar win produced an “uncharacteristic outburst by journalism types across the nation.” It was “a bit of vindication for those who toil in metropolitan and community newsrooms doing the important work of daily journalism” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9). It was an “underdog win for an underdog profession” (Coyle, 2016). Current Globe editor Brian McGrory announced that the staff was “walking a little bit taller” after the win (Pratt, 2016), especially since a few months prior to the Oscars they had been delivering the newspaper to calm angry subscribers (Pratt, 2016). CNN’s Brian Stelter (2016a) reported that “many journalists cheered at home and their own newsrooms, claiming it as a rare bit of good news.” Baron asserted that newspaper publishers were “rededicating themselves to investigative reporting,” having come away from Spotlight “reinvigorated about the role of journalism” (McDermott, 2016).

Playing a secondary role were the audiences for showings of the film, like the one that “rose to its feet when McCarthy brought the real-life journalists on stage” (Whipp, 2015) at a showing in Toronto. Spotlight appealed to a general audience as well as past and current journalists, a rare accomplishment for a post-All the President’s Men journalism-themed movie. Journalists found satisfaction, if not retribution, in the win for Spotlight—a movie “that stands in direct contradiction” to then candidate Trump’s “ongoing war on journalism” (Yamato, 2016). Those helped by the work of journalists also were mentioned. At the Screen Actors Guild awards, Keaton and Ruffalo highlighted the injustice and illness visited on residents of Flint, Michigan thanks to a water supply contaminated by officials. “It comes down to two things: There’s fair and there’s unfair, and I’m always going to vote for the fair,” Keaton said (Coggan & Sneitker, 2016).

As for settings, texts juxtaposed the cramped rooms in which the Spotlight team conducted its investigations, augmented by items from a Toronto Globe and Mail building sold by the paper in 2012 (Cieply & Barnes, 2015), with life on the road for the Globe reporters promoting the film—Pfeiffer called them “brand ambassadors” (Stelter, 2016a)—and the adulation they encountered. Carroll called it “an alternative universe” (Stelter, 2016a). Robinson noted he had spent a great deal of time answering questions about the film from reporters around the world (Stelter, 2016a). Setting the movie in the early 2000s meant that “the desktop computers are bulky, the cellphones flip open, and telephones frequently ring,” noted a Newsweek review (Nazaryan, 2015). Journalists were impressed with how accurately Spotlight depicted life in the newsroom. One hailed the film’s creative team for successfully “reproducing the Globe newsroom in all its beige, cluttered glory” in order to “honor a calling in which clip files attain the patina of a holy grail” (Hornaday, 2016).

Main Narrative Themes

Extended review and analysis of the texts revealed these narrative themes:

Bloodied and Battered

Coverage of Spotlight describes an industry in financial decline, with newspapers closing, staffs being slashed, and ad revenue in freefall. It is “a time of convulsive change” in the newspaper business (Manly, 2015). Journalists nevertheless celebrated Spotlight’s Oscar win, “claiming it as a rare bit of good news for an industry that has been gutted by layoffs” (Stelter, 2016a). “They have been whipsawed by the web and left jobless by the thousands in round after round of layoffs and early retirements,” two New York Times reporters asserted (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). The awards earned by Spotlight “are merely icing on the cake whose candles glow in tribute to long-form print journalism,” asserted Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers (2015), a craft “now fading in the digital fog of budget cuts, reduced resources, and clickbait news cycles.” Michael Keaton, who played Spotlight team leader Walter Robinson, said that he “was pretty sure Flint, Michigan doesn’t have an investigative team in the local paper,” saying “that’s what’s going on in journalism right now” (Coggan & Sneitker, 2016).

The film pays “homage to a brand of journalism that, a decade later, is on the brink of extinction threatened by rapidly shifting economic and technological forces” (Hornaday, 2015, 11/1/15, p. E1). A Denver Post editor noted, “[b]udgets are tighter, space is tighter, and staffs are leaner.” Moreover, public opinion about the work of journalists continues to erode. We see journalists as being only slightly more credible than “lobbyists and telemarketers” (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B10)—or “just above lawyers and members of Congress” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9). Nevertheless, investigative reporting “remains a top mission for many papers and journalists, because readers value deep reporting on local issues that newspapers are equipped to deliver” (Griffin, 2016, p. 3D). Other reporters were far less optimistic. “It’s no secret that investigative work like that at the Boston Globe is an endangered species” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9). McCarthy said that he was unsure if moviegoers recognized that investigative journalism “has been disappearing over the last 15 years” (Liberatore, 2015, p. A1). Yet the reporters told Baron they felt “inspired, buoyed, and affirmed” by the film. Despite the affirmation felt by the reporters, this theme conveys a sense of resignation that investigative reporting may never recapture the significance that propels the “watchdog” myth.

The New Gold Standard?

Spotlight was repeatedly compared with All the President’s Men, called “the gold standard of films about journalism” by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter (Wilson, 2015, p. G22; see also McGovern, 2015). It was “impossible not to draw comparisons” (Rea, 2015). Accolades accumulated long before the Oscars were handed out as the film “inspired people in newsrooms all across the country” (Stelter, 2016b). Some journalists felt Spotlight was as good or better than All the President’s Men. A San Jose Mercury News critic said Spotlight was “the most accurate depiction of journalism put on film, perhaps even the finest example we’ve seen yet” (Myers, 2015). Nowhere to be found in the film are the “reckless dupes and showboats,” the “cowardly, sensationalist media hacks”—“scoundrels,” as Ehrlich and Saltzman (2015) might call them—that according to the narrative usually populate movies about journalism (Savan, 2015). President Obama asserted there was more to executing quality journalism “than just handing someone a microphone.” He urged news executives to resist the pressure “to feed the beast with more gossipy, softer stories” (Freking, 2016). Yet journalists did not in the Spotlight narrative offer any concrete solutions to correct the superficiality and self-promotion that marks today’s journalism. Instead, characters in the narrative were limited to bemoaning flaws in reporting and asserting that journalists in previous eras, when the boundaries between news and entertainment were defended, would do things differently.

Grunt Work

The film received praise for a “deliberate lack of flourish” (Harris, 2015). Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers (2015) asserted that “[t]here’s not an ounce of Hollywood bullshit in it.” The absence of “bullshit,” it was hoped, would cause reporters “to focus on the systemic dimensions of the story” (Scott, 2015). McCarthy and Singer “put us in the worn-out shoes of a motley team of reporters” (Myers, 2015) engaged in “[t]he sausage-making aspect of daily newspaper reporting” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9). The Post’s Ann Hornaday (2015, p. E1) called the movie “a soaring ode to the minutiae that makes riveting cinema out of journalism’s least dramatic moments.” The Associated Press’s Jack Coyle (2016) echoed Hornaday; Spotlight was an “ode to the hard-nosed, methodical work of a journalism increasingly seldom practiced.” McCarthy believed “that the nuts and bolts of journalism at its finest could make for thrilling cinema” (Manly, 2015); he was successful “at turning paperwork maneuverings into high drama” (Nazaryan, 2015) of depicting “the grinding work of real reporting” (Travers, 2015). Showing Spotlight team members waiting for an Excel spreadsheet to materialize “should be cinematic suicide, but is instead thrilling” (Nazaryan, 2015). Instead of peppering the audience with “Oscar-bait moments,” McCarthy took an “unassuming, vainglorious, worker-bee approach” (McGovern, 2015) to characterizing a craft that “sometimes produces dead ends and can sometimes take months for a payoff” (Doolittle, 2016, p. AA9).

Spotlight had executives in Hollywood “buzzing about old-school, shoe-leather newspaper journalism,” wrote CNN’s Brian Stelter (2016a). President Obama noted that “a movie about journalists spending months meticulously calling sources from landlines, and poring over documents with highlighters and microfiche” (Freking, 2016) outdistanced more traditional Hollywood fare to win the Oscar. The narrative underscored the risk taken by McCarthy and Singer to not imbue Spotlight with “the ginned-up emotionalism and standard-issue plot twists that characterize most examples of the genre” (Hornaday, 2015, p. E1). A Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewer said the film expertly depicted “how mundane but difficult it is to dig through a bewildering informational haystack for the truth” (Covert, 2015). Spotlight was “[a] salute to the kind of responsible, meticulous, old-school journalism that is in danger of becoming extinct” (Wilson, 2015, p. G22). A New Yorker writer observed, “[w]e get close-ups of rulers moving down lines of text,” adding, “don’t expect Spotlight to play at an IMAX theatre anytime soon” (Lane, 2015). McCarthy told the New York Times: “Journalism in movies tends to either get slammed or glamorized. We were trying to show process, that this is hard work, that this is draining work and that this is crucial work” (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). But in so doing, the narrative leaves the investigative reporter adrift in a mythic middle ground of sorts. The narrative highlights tactics and tools but deemphasizes the social change their use brings about.

Halcyon Days

Two New York Times journalists asserted that the movie “arrives in pursuit not so much of honors as of the journalistic past” (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). The “taut drama” created by the filmmakers and the actors “exactingly conveys a place and time when old-school investigative reporting held sway” (Myers, 2015). Keaton, who also played a journalist in The Paper, “seemed to borrow the crusading spirit of New York’s Daily News and the machismo of the New York Post” (Nazaryan, 2015). The film was driven by “an unusual degree of purpose, and more than a whiff of nostalgia for a newspaper business that has been radically transformed since the film’s action took place 14 years ago” (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). Baron lamented that in the rush to present new content, today’s journalists less often practice the shoe-leather style of reporting romanticized in the film. He cited a complaint by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward: “They don’t knock on doors! We knocked on doors!” (quoted in McDermott, 2016).

The Spotlight narrative also reminds us that at one time practicing the craft did not require journalists to post, tweet, and promote. They reported before “the world [had been] turned upside down as a result of the digital explosion” (Rieder, 2015). “Sometimes, the journalists meet their subjects in person and write down, on paper, what those subjects have to say,” explained Newsweek’s Alexander Nazaryan (2015). “Nobody writes hot takes or throws up blog posts.” It highlights the loss felt by “those who recall when reading newspapers was a tactile experience” and when the work of journalists “carried a weight and feeling of finality” impossible to achieve as readers are subjected to a “nonstop flow of news online” (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). One journalist warned that while Spotlight might provoke harkening back “to the days when an investigative team was even possible,” at the same time it gave “many not too subtle nods to the coming tsunami of change that was soon to impact the newspaper industry” (Reyes-Chow, 2015). By this, the reporter meant the crushing decline in ad revenue experienced by news outlets after the advent of Google, Facebook, Craigslist, and other online services. Robinson acknowledged the concern of some that Spotlight was “an ode to a long lost love that can never be retrieved” or “a eulogy to a grieving conversation that doesn’t believe in reincarnation” (Chotnier, 2015).

On an Island

Ty Burr (2015) of the Globe noted that after Spotlight’s film festival debut, it was praised “by many people, almost all of them journalists.” After all, he suggested, “[t]he press has to love a movie that glorifies the press, right?” (Burr, 2015). This self-containment became evident in the narrative as Globe journalists were congratulated for their efforts, at times in backhanded fashion. “It’s heroes are the journalists, working class guys who treat journalism like a trade for the masses, not some pious craft reserved for graduate students who deem themselves textual storytellers,” wrote Nazaryan (2015). Thus, even as McCarthy and Singer preached about the importance of investigative reporting, they perhaps inadvertently conveyed the impression that the public has lost interest in it. Whatever impact myths like Watergate once had has been attenuated as the narrative veered what now feels like celebratory navel gazing. “Most people don’t know a journalist,” explained the Guardian’s Alicia Shepard (2016). The public can choose from a plethora of media outlets, “but I don’t think they really understand what professional journalism, institutionally supported journalism, is” (Hornaday, 2015). A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter asserted journalists “will love this movie and appreciate how it doesn’t misrepresent their profession,” but added that the film would provide the public “a rare look behind the curtain where the work can be tedious, difficult, discouraging, heartbreaking, personal and monumentally important” (Vancheri, 2015, p. D1). As Covert (2015) wrote, perhaps hopefully, you “don’t need to be a news junkie to admire such sleek, adult entertainment.”

The lack of familiarity extended to the families of the Globe journalists. Pfeiffer described her family’s reaction: “Oh, now I understand what you do” (Stelter, 2016b). Several journalists interviewed for these stories had to be reintroduced to segments of their own field. While Spotlight was “inspiring to me and others in the news business,” wrote a Denver Post reporter, “it was also maybe a bit intimidating. It was journalism with a capital J, practiced with steely nerves and the courage to stand up to the most powerful community institutions” (Griffin, 2016, p. 3D), something infrequently achieved by today’s listicle-obsessed journalists.

Strangers in a Strange Land

The narrative suggests Globe reporters were unaccustomed to and often uncomfortable with the public relations demands attendant to the film’s success. The narrative underscores their discomfort with publicity and that they endured it to underscore the importance of investigative reporting. Yet the fact that they were as prominent in the narrative as the movie’s stars weakened the latter’s potential to serve as role models for future journalists and fans of the craft. Globe reporters wanted no extended part of the celebrity that caused Lionel Barber (2008), Schudson (1995), and others to fear that fame would distract journalists from serving the public. Thus, coverage of Spotlight’s success had a distinct “stranger in a strange land” feel. Spotlight reporters longed to get back to the newsroom, even as they made the most of the chance to honor the victims of abuse, to advocate for continued investigation of pedophile priests, and more broadly for investigative reporting as a career. Globe journalists “parachuted into Hollywood the way reporters sometimes parachute into strange, unfamiliar lands” (Stelter, 2016a). Baron expressed dismay at “how the saddening subject of sexual abuse had arrived at this bizarre intersection with celebrity, paparazzi and red-carpet interviews” (McPhate, 2016). The Spotlight team received a standing ovation after a showing at the Toronto Film Festival (Baron, 2016; McPhate, 2016). The narrative suggests that the journalism, more than the film or the issues it raised, benefited from Hollywood’s mythmaking apparatus. Nevertheless, these “bunch of scruffy, middle-aged newspaper journalists” were “the hottest heroes in Hollywood” as the film neared its release date (Cieply & Barnes, 2015, p. B1). It was a necessary evil not a source of mythic affirmation.

The reporters’ tentative embrace of Hollywood overshadowed a reality suggested in the narrative that Spotlight’s impact would have been limited absent the massive exposure. Carroll’s wife was quoted as saying, “When you won the Pulitzer, you got like one week’s worth of attention. Now they make a movie out of this thing, and it’s been months” (Stelter, 2016b). Walter Robinson admitted that Spotlight’s impact was “substantially greater than anything we can do” on “the front page of the paper” (Stelter, 2016b). But the push to publicize troubled Pfieffer, who acknowledged she had “gotten kind of shameless” during public appearances about Spotlight, “really urging young people to subscribe” (Stelter, 2016b). The impact described by Robinson was achieved despite the fact that Spotlight was anything but a typical Hollywood blockbuster. Spotlight “doesn’t bellow, harangue, or manipulate; nor does it sensationalize, demonize, or deify,” wrote Variety’s Justin Chang (2016). The film “determinedly refuses to call attention to itself” (Chang, 2016). It is a “gripping, deliberate, old-fashioned kind of movie, unflashy and unembroidered (Vaughan, 2015),” with a “minimum of melodramatic window dressing (Burr, 2015),” a “solid procedural that tries to confront evil without sensationalism” (Scott, 2015). These laudatory assessments, I contend, make it less likely that Spotlight will be held up as an affirmation of the “watchdog” journalist myth.

Conclusions

In June 2017—less than a year and a half after Spotlight won the Oscar—McCarthy was interviewed by Boston Globe reporter Mark Shanahan (2017). “I watched Spotlight again the other night. It still holds up,” Shanahan began. McCarthy laughed and replied, “Good to know it hasn’t aged in 1 year.” At an event in North Carolina, Pfeiffer confessed that she first thought making a movie about the Catholic Church investigation “was a terrible idea.” Yet McCarthy, Singer, and the cast “not only got it right, but found ways to make even some of the more tedious chores suspenseful” (Funk, 2017). Rezendes (Burke, 2017), however, struck a more ominous chord during a speech at Fitchburg State University; budget cuts and newsroom layoffs have not let up, he said, nor have President Trump’s lies and attacks. In July 2018, Tronc, a Chicago-based media conglomerate, laid off the editorial staff at the New York Daily News (Peiser, 2018). Polling suggests public trust in the media has dropped to its lowest point (Swift, 2016). Nevertheless, McCarthy said that he believed there is no “better time to be a journalist. They are the superheroes of today” (Siegler, 2017). The narrative that coalesced in these texts supports McCarthy; operating in the local mode, the journalists who reviewed and analyzed Spotlight meticulously reminded readers that the Globe journalists were at the top of their game and that their work greatly benefitted society. The narrative trumpets the high standards at which the journalists operated and underscores the ongoing societal need for their work.

But it was in the durational mode, where a field’s history is written and rewritten, where these journalists reluctantly came to grips with a new dilemma: the beginning of the Watergate myth’s demise. Repeated careful readings of these texts suggest that Spotlight’s gritty, mundane realism may have in fact damaged its mythic potential; it signals the negation of the “watchdog” journalist myth. “After all, investigative reporting isn’t exactly a Hollywood pursuit,” noted an NBC reporter (Hines, 2015). Today anchor Savannah Guthrie agreed, arguing the field was “about the least Hollywood thing you could imagine” (Hines, 2015). Not that this is a bad thing: A lack of major stars and dramatic flair combined with a focus on the “tedious daily grind” of journalism “deglamorizes the profession and restores a simple sense of collective mission and integrity,” asserted Ann Hornaday (2016) of the Washington Post. Rezendes flatly rejected “the cliche of the journalist as righteous iconoclast,” stating the journalist is “never more or less than decent” (Nazaryan, 2015).

Despite the efforts of McCarthy, Singer, the Spotlight cast, the Spotlight team, and the journalists whose work is analyzed in this essay, the paucity of news coverage about Spotlight since the Oscars as well as lingering disenchantment with journalists suggests that the narrative outlined in this essay has not resonated with the public, even as it reenergized the journalistic community. The narrative provides some obvious clues as to why, even if it does ask us to revisit the “heroic journalist” (W. J. Campbell, 2010) myth. First, journalists suggest the diligence of Spotlight’s actors to accurately depict their Globe colleagues also invokes the corrosive fluidity of the professional boundaries between journalism and its many imitators. This is underscored by the discomfort of the Spotlight journalists caused by having to be shadowed by actors as the film was being made and then treated as celebrities on its release. Second, the narrative emerging from this coverage confirms that since Watergate, investigative reporters have toiled in obscurity and need the occasional jolt of publicity to reintroduce themselves and the importance of their work to the public. Third, the methods used by the Globe reporters—poring through old diocesan directories and doggedly tracking down people—come off as antiquated. The relative anonymity of the Spotlight journalists and their sheer tenacity and dedication to truth are still necessary professional attributes, but they are also positioned in this coverage as hallmarks of journalism’s halcyon days. They only become central to the discourse about journalism when those days are celebrated. Even as the narrative asks the reader to revisit the “heroic journalist” myth, I argue that its various elements mitigate against endorsement; the field’s financial distress, the focus on “grunt work,” the desire of the film’s creators to honor journalism’s past, the impression that journalists had been cordoned off somewhere until the film reintroduced us to them, and the Spotlight team begrudgingly accepting Hollywood’s demands—even the repeated comparisons to All the President’s Men—coalesce to negate Spotlight’s potential to remind us of the need for aggressive, uncompromising investigative reporting and to affirm the myth of the dogged investigative journalist. After begrudgingly acceding to Hollywood’s demands, the Spotlight reporters returned to work for a financially ailing employer, again cordoned off in their cramped, uninspiring newsrooms, the “bright lights” of Hollywood—and the temporary public validity realized in their glow—only a memory.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Ronald Bishop is a professor in the Department of Communication at Drexel University. He also directs the department’s undergraduate programs. He has published more than 30 journal articles and five books; the latest, “Holding Up the Sky Together: Unpacking the National Narrative about People With Intellectual Disabilities,” was published in 2017 by Hamilton Books.

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