Abstract
Two recent films perfectly underpin the importance of the press as the watchdog of big institutions and their influence over society They are about The Boston Globe in 2002 and The Sunday Times in the 1970s, and for anyone fast-forwarding to internet dominance in the media they provide a checklist of the requirements of investigative and campaigning journalism. Top of that list is probably time. Indeed the Spotlight investigations unit at the Globe, which has full-time staff and has been in existence for 45 years, has published just 102 stories. Difficult and initially buried stories.
The award-winning movie Spotlight is a dramatised account of the unit's Pulitzer-winning investigation into paedophilia in the Catholic church. When the investigation team's editor, played by Michael Keaton, (spoiler alert!) realises that he'd missed the potential enormity of the story in a related news item he published some years previously, a member of the team says consolingly: “Most of the time we are stumbling around in the dark, then suddenly a light goes on and there's a fair share of blame to go round.”
Now isn't that the truth? Successful journalists and editors live between probing impenetrable darkness and the barbed tongues of those with 20:20 hindsight.
Spotlight is Keaton's second foray into investigative journalism. In The Paper (1994), a fast and funny film about a fictional New York tabloid, he memorably wrestles to the press-gantry floor his money-focused managing editor, played by Glenn Close, in a fight to publish a scoop about police corruption. You can almost hear the ghostly cheers of newsrooms around the globe.
Despite its fairground barker Roll up! Roll up! title, the documentary Attacking the Devil, Harry Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, is a forensic study of investigative journalism. In particular, it shows how The Sunday Times' Insight team found themselves thrashing like fish on a carpet to find a way past the law on contempt of court to publish what they knew about the scale and effects of thalidomide and Distillers Company's involvement.
Meanwhile, as the frustrated journalists looked on, those affected were being silenced with “better than nothing” financial settlements. Fascinatingly, it was the sudden realisation that there was a different, legal way of looking at the story that allowed the paper to start swimming again. In many ways the rest is now history But the delay is not without its critics.
The joy of these two stories of tenacious journalism is the acknowledgement of the slog that's put in to benefit the public. This is not quick, knee-jerk work; 102 stories are not going to fill up anyone's web sphere, yet this particular Boston Globe story identified more than 70 abusing priests, 600 victims and the culpability of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston (who resigned).
There are small signs that the next generation of media is hoping to take up the challenge. There are plenty of online investigative journalists who realise that they need time and seek to fund themselves in inventive crowd-funding and project-sponsoring ways. But watch Spotlight and you'll understand what these lone wolves are missing. It's the teamwork, the resources, the relationship with the community and the legal back-up that produces major results. Forget less is more. This is one area where more is more.
The scale of the web and its ability to reach people's homes without charging a penny undoubtedly offers persuasive power and a future where no one, good or bad, has anywhere to hide. The Sunday Times Insight team was working on the thalidomide story in the 1970s when there was no internet. Undoubtedly it would have assisted those affected to find each other and to make their voices heard.
All the same, much outrage on the web currently translates into not much more than massed howling voices. But if information sources start to post their ethical credentials, perhaps joining forces with code-following traditional media, that could change.
The voracious appetite of the web for trivia makes even the finest investigative journalists nervous: “We have to keep a balance,” said the real-life Spotlight reporter Sacha Pfeiffer in a Globe web documentary, “where alongside news about celebrities we still have in-depth, long-term reporting and editors have the patience to leave you out of the paper for a while.”
There is an argument in the slow journalism camp that it is the rush to be first with everything that is a dark side force destroying considered analysis and resulting in bite-size stories of no substance.
The movement's own magazine, Delayed Gratification, says it is proud to be the “last to breaking news”. Instead, it reflects on the events of the quarter and re-examines them in depth. However, with all this analysis, experience suggests there is a good chance that it could find itself breaking a story despite itself. Certainly, The Globe intended to be first with its thunderous story, even if it raced at walking pace.
