By MACKENZIE FARMER, Staff Reporter ¦
I recently watched the movie “Spotlight” and I believe this is one movie everyone needs to watch. The movie is based on a true story about a team of investigative journalists in 2001 from “The Boston Globe” who cover the story of child sex abuse cases by priests in the Catholic Church.
When they first start investigating the story, the team thinks they are only covering one priest who abused more than 80 boys, while three archbishops of Boston who knew about it did nothing to stop him.
As the team continues to investigate, they start uncovering more and more priests in the Boston area who had been sexually abusing children.
The archbishop knew about it and did nothing except move these priests to a new church or send them to one of their treatment centers.
After months of investigating and uncovering, the team finally releases the story. After that, they start to receive hundreds of tips and information about more priests who had been abusing children. Because of this, the team is able to write many more stories about the abuse that had taken place.
This movie is so important to watch for a few of reasons.
The first reason is that this movie shows the importance of journalism. Without the editor of “The Boston Globe” and the Spotlight team, this story probably would have never been covered and the public might have not been made aware of the abuse in the Catholic Church.
In the movie, you can see how hard the team works to get accurate information. For every priest they find who might have been abusing children, they work to find sources to confirm it. They talk to as many people as they can find, including lawyers who defended victims and the Catholic Church.
Even though the events of “Spotlight” took place over 15 years ago, this story is still extremely relevant.
If you didn’t know, recently a report came out about Catholic priests in Pennsylvania who had abused at least 1,000 children. This shows that the cases in Boston were not alone, but that it is happening all over.
The different outlets of journalism have helped people all over America come out and tell their stories. Journalists have helped give people a voice when others might not have believed them.
Like I said before, I firmly believe everyone should watch “Spotlight” to at least see how important journalists are.
The movie is available to watch on Netflix and you can read all the stories that cover the different cases at https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/spotlight-movie.
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