Epiphany in Boston
In fact, the investigative staff of The Boston Globe has done the Catholic Church an enormous favor. … They were the good guys, the guys in the white hats as opposed to the bad guys in the red hats.
Marty Baron’s nomination letter for the 2003 Public Service Pulitzer summed up the results of the Spotlight Team investigation. “By year’s end, the scandal had forced the removal of four-hundred-fifty accused priests nationwide,” he wrote. What had emerged … was “a nationwide pattern within the Catholic Church of concealing abuse by priests and a practice of shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish.” The editor also quoted Father Andrew M. Greeley as writing that without the Globe accounts “the abuse would have gone right on. There would have been no crisis, no demand from the laity that the church cut out this cancer of irresponsibility, corruption and sin, and no charter for the protection of children.”
When Public Service jury chair Bill Ketter, editor of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Eagle-Tribune, met with fellow jurors in March 2003, he says, there was agreement that “it was the Globe‘s year in public service.” There were ninety entries to review, and no major natural disasters that had put newspapers in that kind of service role, he notes. Along with the Globe, jurors selected Florida’s Pensacola News Journal for a series on county-government corruption and the Detroit News for a series on defects in the criminal justice system.
For the Pulitzer Board members who convened at Columbia, too, the Church scandal “was obviously the big news of the year,” says Oregonian editor Sandra Mims Rowe, who was on the Board. “You knew the Globe was going to end up being a contender long before you got to the meeting.” But under the Board’s analysis, it was anything but automatic. In her 1996-to-2004 term as a Board member, coverage of major stories often was faulted for flaws that turned up under intense review. “You’d see things and say, Boy, in the right hands, this could be wonderful, but the quality of the work just is not there,” she says. In the Globe‘s case, though, “the caliber of the journalism and the execution were something rare.”
That opinion extended far beyond the Board. “In some ways, the clerical abuse scandal has become a journalism textbook. Consider the elements: power, corruption, intrigue, tragedy, sex, betrayal, money — and an institution that dates back 2,000 years,” then-Los Angeles Times New England correspondent Elizabeth Mehren wrote in a study of the crisis for Nieman Reports. “The villains are despicable. Meanwhile, the proverbial quest for truth and justice — what brought us all into this line of endeavor, after all — is always at the forefront.”
Like The New York Times award the year before [for creating the “A Nation Challenged” news section after the World Trade Center attacks], the Pulitzer Board’s selection of the Globe for the Gold Medal was hardly a surprise. On Pulitzer Monday the Globe staff — which for purely superstitious reasons had avoided using “the P-word,” as [Spotlight Team leader Walter V.] Robinson put it — congregated in the newsroom to watch the 3 p.m. news cross the wires. Then began a forty-five-minute love fest. At the beginning of the eighteen months spent studying the claims against priests, the paper couldn’t know the magnitude of the problem or the depth of the scandal, Baron said. “And now it’s nine hundred stories later, and many hours of very hard work later. And now we know. We know that the Church covered up. We know that known abusers were continually placed in positions where they could abuse again. We know that victims were ignored or dismissed. We know that abusive priests were coddled. And we know this because of what was done here, in this newsroom and by our colleagues.”
Baron had also learned for sure that being a New York Times Co. operation did not mean losing stories to its mighty big sister, even if Times Co. policy did require the Globe to consult corporate lawyers before planning court filings. (Later, Baron says, he was told by “insiders” that Times‘ executive editor Howell Raines “was annoyed that we were onto the biggest story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer. He then put a lot of resources — think ‘flood the zone’ philosophy — on the story, with the hope that the Times could garner the national reporting Prize” while the Globe pursued the local story.)
“There’s No Harder Target”
Just when did the Globe team members first sense that the story had the potential to be a blockbuster, and perhaps a recipient of the Public Service Pulitzer? [Reporter] Matt Carroll admits to acknowledging the prospect of a prize during the April 2002 Pulitzer announcements, when The New York Times and its staffers walked off with its seven awards, including the Gold Medal. “I remember thinking, Gee, I wonder if they’ll be announcing our names next year,” he says. “It’s one of the things you dismiss, and then move ahead.”
Ben Bradlee [Jr., the deputy managing editor for projects and investigations] had a feeling after he observed the lack of negative reaction to the first Globe stories from among the Catholic community, and from Cardinal Law himself. It was then that he had told Baron that the story had hit a home run. “We struck a nerve,” the projects editor says. “You never know when a story is going to have that kind of Zeitgeist.” He and his famous father at The Washington Post checked in regularly with each other as the Church story developed, although they each say that they never compared the unfolding Church scandal to Watergate.
Comparisons of the two scandals come naturally to others. In some ways, notes Steve Kurkjian — veteran of three Globe Pulitzer-winning teams — the Church stories may have hit harder than Watergate, because there was little surprise that Washington politicians, even at the highest levels, would lie to protect themselves. With the Church story, “never have you had an institution with this vaunted an image taking such a blow.”
The Globe‘s reporting and the Post‘s Watergate coverage both focused on cover-ups, Robinson adds. He believes the Church’s deceit was far more troubling than the crime. “It facilitated further abuse over the years, by the same and other people,” he says, “and it undermined the integrity of the institution in ways from which it will never recover.”
From Bob Woodward comes high praise for the Globe, along with a warning for the media about how few other papers assume the same kinds of risks that the Globe and the Post did. “It takes a particular kind of energy and courage on the part of editors and publishers to support daily incremental coverage,” Woodward says. Too many projects today involve “low-hanging fruit,” subjects that reporters and readers already know are tinged with scandal. “I worry sometimes that we don’t pick the really hard, important targets that have much broader implications,” he adds. “That’s where I take my hat off to the Globe, because there’s no harder target than the Catholic Church.”
