Name: How Spotlight Dramatizes Good Journalism
Uploaded: 2026-02-04T17:09:13.000Z
Duration: 8 min 29 s
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How do you tell a story about telling a story?

That was the creative challenge facing the filmmakers of the 2015 Best Picture winner, Spotlight, a movie about an investigative reporting team at the Boston Globe who exposed systematic child sex abuse by Catholic priests in the Boston area.

The kind of storytelling in question is journalism.

Specifically print journalism, Even more specifically investigative print journalism.

What Director Tom McCarthy and his team wanted to do was capture this kind of storytelling as honestly as possible to show what it really looks like when it's done right.

Once we settle on a project, we can spend a year or more investigating it.

Investigative reporting can be a long and tedious process full of dead ends and monotonous tasks.

That doesn't mean the results are boring or that there aren't moments of intensity in the reporting.

Only that the kind of journalism that produces stories like the one in Spotlight involves a lot of mind numbing work.

In fact, the ability to engage in that kind of tedium is, I think, an essential feature of investigative journalism.

And that poses a problem for anybody who might want to capture the profession on film as it really is.

Earl Williams captured by the Morning Post exclusive.

Yeah, and I want you to tear out the whole front page.

That's why they sent the whole front page out.

As soon as there were movies, there were movies about reporters.

The first time Charlie Chaplin ever appeared on screen, in 1914, he played a swindler impersonating a journalist.

In 1919, Harry Houdini played a newspaper reporter who is wrongly accused of murder and must make a series of daring escapes in order to find the real killer.

Already in the silent film era, stereotypes start to form of news people that are still recognizable today of the intrepid crusading journalist who, like the detective, often uses questionable tactics to land the big scoop or expose the corruption of the rich and powerful.

In these films, writes historian Howard Good journalists were by turns idealists and hardened cynics, crusaders and midnight conspirators.

Our attitude toward them continually swings from dark to bright and back again.

You're a journalist, Hildy, a journalist.

This complicated stereotype carried right into the talkies.

The reporters In Howard Hawk's 1940 classic, His Girl Friday embody all these qualities perfectly.

They are wisecracking and world weary, sometimes nasty and unscrupulous, yet they fight for the truth and the little guy against the powers that be.

In the decades that followed, journalists on film were Sometimes heroes like Humphrey Bogart in Deadline usa and sometimes villains like Kurt Douglas in Ace in the Hole or Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success.

Whether the reasons were good or bad, though, reporters were always willing to do whatever it took to get the story.

For a brief time in the late 70s, journalists became superheroes.

The closest predecessor, Spotlight, is, of course, Alan Pacula's all the President's Men, about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein peeling back the layers of the Watergate scandal.

Investigative reporters were the perfect heroes for a paranoid era, shining the light of truth into the dark corners of power.

With the help of master cinematographer Gordon Willis, Pacula visualized this antagonism by making the Washington Post newsroom a place of bright light and deep focus within a city absolutely draped in shadow.

Like Spotlight, all the President's Men is less about the story at the heart of the film, in this case Watergate, and

The movie popularized the phrase follow the money, and

though that's a great line, in practice, following the money isn't all that exciting.

It involves a lot of paperwork and cross referencing, searching for people's contact information, dealing with bureaucrats knocking on doors, verifying and reverifying.

That is the real, unglamorous daily slog of a reporter.

And if you don't communicate that in a movie about journalism, you haven't really done what you've set out to do.

But you can't make a movie boring just so that it's authentic.

The challenge for Pacula, and 40 years later for Tom McCarthy, is to dramatize the undramatic.

Even though montages can be cliche, they are still a useful tool for conveying effort.

In Spotlight, a key development in the investigation occurs when reporters discover pedophile priests are being classified as being on sick leave in church directories.

So they scrub years and years of these directories to identify priests with that designation.

Tracking what they find in a spreadsheet.

Now, there's nothing exciting about inputting data into Excel, but

a montage allows McCarthy to show this crucial part of the investigation in a lively way, while also conveying the feeling of drudgery required another tool, and

by definition a less appreciated one, is understatement.

Spotlight uses this even more than all the President's Men.

The cinematography is simple, the color palette is muted, the production and costume design messy and modest.

Howard Shore's score isn't in your face, and it's used sparingly.

McCarthy's direction doesn't call attention to itself.

His camera moves are functional, inconspicuous.

Now, this isn't a knock on the people who worked on these things.

It takes just as much art to create a reserved aesthetic as it does to create a stylized one.

It's going to get a lot less attention, but that's the point.

The understated tone of Spotlight, from the performances to the visuals to the music, serves the story perfectly.

It tells us something vital about the nature of good journalism, that the work is sober and its practitioners meticulous, that some deeply important truths only exist on the other side of months or years of unglamorous reporting.

A few years after Spotlight, Spielberg made the Post, which has the same goals, but

I think leans a little too far into righteousness, to the point where this newsroom aesthetic became susceptible to parody.

Newspaper movie featuring men in bad ties and short sleeved colored shirts Gross Styrofoam coffee cups and you can bet your sweet ass there's a scene with a very long pregnant pause while everyone waits for the editor to say, let's, let's go, let's do it.

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's publish.

Like anything else, it's important to capture journalism honestly.

When we see what reporting really looks like, we better understand what resources are required for the best version of it to thrive.

Spotlight shows us what the gold standard is.

To quote David Simon, creator of the Wire, it's a bunch of people who go out and acquire information in a systemic way and then bring it back to a collective of people with real experience and real institutional memory who have an understanding of the continuity and context of issues and can determine the news value and publish it accordingly.

Getting that complex and nuanced message through in a two hour movie is impressive.

Then again, journalists do that kind of thing all the time.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching this episode was brought to you by Amazon Studios and the Amazon original film the Report, starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, and

Thank you to Amazon Studios for sponsoring this video and agreeing, like all my other sponsors, to let me have full creative control on this piece.

Amazon actually sent me the report a couple months ago and I really liked it.

It's powerful work from writer, director Scott Z.

though it's not a movie about journalism, it has a lot of the same thriller and investigative elements as all the President's Men and Spotlight.

Critics have called the movie gripping and eye opening, a portrait of American heroism, and

festival crowds played seem to really like it as well.

The Report is out now in select theaters and available on Amazon Prime Video across the globe November 29th.

For ticketing and more information about this film from writer, director and producer Scott Z.

Burns, go to Amazon.com thereportmovie thanks guys.