‘Spotlight’ shows old-school journalism at its finest

Spotlight is a movie about journalism that captures the best reasons why its most ardent practitioners love their jobs, not least of all the thrill of the chase.

The giant, elusive quarry in this true story is the Catholic Church in Boston and the seekers a team of four investigative journalists with the Boston Globe assigned to find proof that church leaders covered up years of child sex abuse by priests. It was a local story that resonated globally, including in the Philippines, and triggered probes of priest misbehavior in many Catholic countries.

It's an unlikely subject for a suspense movie, with a rumpled reporter as a main character (played with a seething intensity by Mark Ruffalo, better known for bringing the Hulk to life) working with newspaper colleagues in cluttered office cubicles.

What made the blood race for news dinosaurs like me is how accurately it mirrored the passions that drove sleep-deprived scribes from another era, before social media dispersed everyone's attention and blurred the lines between journalists and witnesses with smartphones.

It's quaint now to see journalists actually doing research amid stacks of church directories, until the eureka moment of confirming a hunch. (The year was 2001; the Internet and Google already existed but not Facebook.)

One felt too the sensation of the reporters nailing the smoking gun and hearing their editor tell them matter-of-factly, "this is what we live for."

Believe it or not, that's what the best journos live for, not prizes, not fame, not money, but the private gratification of finding facts that make the powerful accountable, including the amiable, dignified Catholic cardinal in the story who covered up the pedophilia under his nose.

But before that triumphant moment in the film, we see the heroes make the often fruitless phone calls and awkward house visits that are the unglamorous hallmarks of investigative journalism.

These are flawed heroes, real people who are still living and recreated with painstaking precision by the writers and actors. We see reporter Mike Rezendes, the character played by Ruffalo, lose his cool and explode at the head of his team, played with steely resolve by Michael Keaton, who wanted his temperamental reporter to sit on a burning story until it got even bigger. It’s a familiar tension between reporter and editor.

This is a movie with a cause, and it's not just to expose the rot in a hallowed institution. The Boston Globe already did that.

Spotlight refreshes the notion of journalism for public service, at a time when the kind of time-consuming digging that enterprise reporting demands is under threat from the dizzying pace of online news.

The Academy Award it just won for best picture may fire up at least a few more bright millennials to try to change the world by speaking truth to power with a tidal wave of facts.

The light began to shine on the Philippine Catholic Church around the same years that the Boston Globe was doing its Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Instead of a team, however, that derring-do was associated mostly with a single Filipino journalist, the unassuming, utterly dedicated Aries Rufo, who passed away last year at the age of 45.

For more than two decades, Rufo sought to make the Catholic Church accountable, exposing a bishop with a girlfriend, the missing donations to the iconic Radio Veritas, and other violations of public trust. This in a country where Catholicism is more dominant than it will ever be in the United States. And Rufo did it with the backing of news organizations much smaller than the Boston Globe – the Manila Times, Newsbreak and Rappler. He wrote a book in 2013 about the church, Altar of Secrets, that compiled his pioneering reporting.

His work inspired me to examine the church in a documentary I did several years ago. He declined to be interviewed without giving a reason, a rejection I respected and even admired. Maybe it was out of shyness but perhaps he also thought any public visibility would make him less effective in the kind of quiet observation that all great reporters also do.

One fervently hopes that his kind of journalism finds a place in this age of disruption. Spotlight introduces it to the selfie generation and shows that society will need dedicated public-oriented fact seekers as long as there are powerful institutions with secrets. —KG, GMA News