There are many excellent reasons to see the powerful new movie, Spotlight, a remarkably accurate portrait of journalism without any made-up superheroes or onscreen explosions.
For me, it was nostalgia for a time when journalism could create a real-life explosion with its mundane, everyday work of making phone calls, conducting interviews and researching records to produce a really significant story powerful people don’t want anyone to know.
That’s what a Boston Globe investigative team did when it exposed the monstrous extent of the Catholic Church cover up of its sexual abuse of children.
The Globe won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for courageous coverage “that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national and international reaction and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.”
The Globe deserves all the accolades it received. But for those of us who were reporters for The Milwaukee Journal in the mid-1990s, there was always something bittersweet about The Globe’s celebrated achievement.
That’s because we know one of our own had an opportunity much earlier to score the same sort of important breakthrough in the slowly emerging international scandal of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.
It wasn’t just a matter of local journalism pride. If it had happened here nearly a decade earlier, nobody knows how many fewer children would have been victimized.
It was 1994 and The Milwaukee Journal had recently hired Mary Jo Meisner as its editor. Meisner was the first woman to hold the job and the first to be hired from the outside rather than being promoted from within.
She came here from a managing editor job in Fort Worth, Texas, after previous job-hopping had given her middle management experience in Philadelphia, San Jose and at The Washington Post.
Milwaukee Abuse Story Killed
The staff was still trying to get a read on Meisner when Marie Rohde, the newspaper’s tenacious religion reporter, handed in a comprehensive series she’d been working on for months about the budding church scandal.
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It contained new information revealing the extent to which the church, through the Milwaukee Archdiocese and others across the country, had paid out millions of dollars in private settlements to keep widespread accusations of child sexual abuse, many by repeat offenders, from ever being made public.
In a story similar to one repeated in Spotlight, Rohde also interviewed a former Milwaukee priest who’d been removed from the priesthood for crimes against children who sought to explain and to some extent justify his actions.
As was true throughout the church, Archbishop Rembert Weakland and the local Catholic hierarchy were not happy to have their own actions and inactions reported when given an advance opportunity to respond.
Instead, Weakland and a large entourage from the Archdiocese showed up in the newsroom to meet with Meisner and Rohde to argue against publication.
The reason many reporters from that time know what happened in that meeting is that Rohde came out of the office impressed at being strongly supported by our new editor.
Meisner told the archbishop she understood why he was uncomfortable with the series, but that it was an important story well documented by Rohde.
Meisner said she was at The Post when the newspaper reported one of the early scandals involving a D.C.-area priest over the objections of the Catholic Church there. It was part of a newspaper’s responsibility to its community, she said.
As that story spread in the newsroom, the staff shared Rohde’s excitement at having an editor who stood behind her reporters.
I don’t know that anyone in the newsroom ever received an explanation for what happened next. But Rohde’s series never appeared in The Milwaukee Journal.
The common assumption was that when Archbishop Weakland didn’t get satisfaction from the Journal editor, he went to someone above her within the company, most likely publisher and board chairman Robert Kahlor.
Whether that was the reason or not, we later learned that in other newsroom meetings Meisner displayed a completely different attitude and actively discouraged aggressive reporting on the church child abuse scandal.
Within months, Kahlor put her to work doing what she was really hired to do—brutally downsizing a merged Journal and Sentinel by firing several hundred experienced, accomplished journalists. (Full disclosure: I was one of them).
Rohde was removed from the religion beat and exiled to covering suburban village boards, usually a starting reporter job. Meisner herself was asked to resign about a year later.
That painful personal experience for many of the best journalists I’ve ever known turned out to be just the beginning of what’s been an almost straight-line decline of journalism ever since, not just locally but nationally as well.
Bottom-line business decisions and fear of offending declining readership have pretty much extinguished the journalistic courage that once allowed great daily newspapers to expose powerful institutions in their own communities attempting to hide wrongdoing.
Reliving everything that’s been lost makes Spotlight one of the saddest movies anyone who cares about journalism or their communities will ever see.
