The Houston Chronicle’s “Abuse of Faith” newspaper series about sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention likely would not have been possible without an earlier expose of the Roman Catholic Church published by the Boston Globe, that paper’s former editor said.
Martin Baron, former editor of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, was keynote speaker for a 90th anniversary gala dinner sponsored by Religion News Service in New York City Sept. 10. He spoke in dialogue with RNS National Reporter Adelle Banks at Fordham University, a Catholic school.
Martin Baron
The Globe’s 2002 series that unraveled decades of coverups of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church set the stage for investigations and reports into other systems of abuse, he said. “It has had a significant effect on holding other institutions accountable. The Southern Baptist Convention is an example of one institution. … It had an impact on other institutions like the Boy Scouts and Penn State, and it continues to reverberate throughout the world.”
A single sentence
The spark that launched the Globe Spotlight team’s investigation of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boston came on Baron’s first day on the job, he explained.
“The day before I started work, there was a column written by a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist, Eileen McNamara, who by then I had met, and she talked about this case of a priest by the name of Father John Geoghan. And he was accused of having abused as many as 80 kids. She said the lawyer for the plaintiff said the cardinal himself, Cardinal Law, was aware of that abuse and yet continually reassigned that priest from parish to parish without notifying anybody. Not the parish priest, not the parishioners, and certainly not the public.”
“When somebody says the truth may never be known, it’s like it should be chum to journalists.”
But it was a single line at the end of McNamara’s column that set fire for Baron, he continued. “At the end of the column, she … said that the truth may never be known because the internal church documents were under a court seal, under a confidentiality order. … And when somebody says the truth may never be known, it’s like it should be chum to journalists. And it was chum to me at that moment, particularly this guy who was wondering ‘Where are the good stories in Boston?’
“And so I went into our news meeting the next day and everybody went around the table talking about — department heads and assistant department heads — about what story they were intended to work on. And nobody mentioned this case. And I said, ‘Well, I just read this story about this whole case. We’ve got one side says one thing and the other side says something else. We need to get to the truth of the matter.”
Then, somebody spoke up to say the documents were under seal. “And I said, ‘I know; I read that in the column, but I’m not from Massachusetts. But in Florida where there have been big public records cases, these are not public records, and our instinct would’ve been to try to get those documents. Have we thought about doing that?’”
He remembered: “It was just silent, just total silence. I think people were a little surprised that their new editor on his first day at his first meeting would talk about doing something that would challenge the most powerful institution all of. And so I said, ‘Why don’t we talk about it afterward?’ And so we did and we got our outside lawyer on the phone and he said he would look into the case whether we might actually bring a lawsuit to try to get access to those documents.”
Baron went to talk with McNamara, who had written the story, and she informed him the newspaper never had done a “proper investigation” of the allegations against the Catholic Church.
Baron then called together the Spotlight investigative team and, with the green light from legal counsel, began digging into what would become one of the biggest religions news stories of modern times.
Tedious journalism
The work of the investigative team was featured in the movie Spotlight, which Banks said “depicted the nuts and bolts of investigative journalism.”
Baron affirmed that the movie correctly portrays the detailed work his investigative team went through, including combing through parish directories to find the names of abusive priests who got shuffled around.
“They did go to the directories and they saw that certain priests were assigned to a particular facility, and that was known as a facility where people were sent,” Baron explained. “You could actually count up the number of priests who were credibly accused of abuse. They were sent there and you could count up how many there were over a certain period of time. They developed a spreadsheet just as the movie reflects and then came back and reported it.”
“It’s just a lot of manual labor. It’s tedious.”
What his team did is “doable in any newsroom,” Baron said. “It’s just a lot of manual labor. It’s tedious. I mean, I think one of the great things about the movie is that it shows the tedium involved in reporting.”
That other news outlets have done similar tedious investigations on all manner of abuse and corruption is “a great sign about our journalism, a great sign that we still have the capacity and most importantly, the will to do that kind of work,” he said.
Not an attack
He emphasized that the Globe’s reporting on abusive priests and complicit bishops was “not an attack on the church.”
Instead, the series showed how “the church was betraying its parishioners and betraying its principles,” he said. “Principles are valuable. And I think a lot of the reason we were not attacked actually in Boston by parishioners, as we expected to be, was that they realized they had been betrayed and their principles had been betrayed. And that was deeply disturbing to them.”
Investigative journalism still essential
Today, journalists must apply the same rigor and commitment to investigative reporting on other issues of the moment, including threats to democracy, Baron said.
“Investigative journalism … (is) the heart of who we are and what our mission is.”
“Investigative journalism … (is) the heart of who we are and what our mission is and the public wants us and expects us to do that kind of work,” he observed.
The current threat to democracy in America is a partisan issue, he declared. “The kinds of things Donald Trump is talking about are the measures you see in authoritarian countries. I mean, that’s just a fact. Talking about using the military to suppress legitimate protests, talking about putting your political enemies, bringing treason charges against them, subjecting them to military tribunals. It’s just a fact that those are the kinds of things authoritarians have done in other countries.”
Americans now see how fragile democracy is, he said. “We shouldn’t take anything for granted.”
The press “plays an incredibly important role” in protecting democracy, he added. “We are in that thing called the First Amendment. We are mentioned prominently and specifically about the role of an independent press. And I always try to remind people that when James Madison was the principal author of the First Amendment, and he talked about, the quote is: ‘The reason for having the First Amendment was “the need for freely examining public characters and measures.’”
Baron said: “The word really to focus on is the word ‘examining.’ We’re not stenographers, OK? We’re not activists, but we’re not stenographers either. We have to look behind the curtain, we have to look beneath the surface. That’s our absolute duty. And I view those words from James Madison as essentially the original assignment given to the independent press in this country.”
Related articles:
Anthea Butler explains the Catholic version of Christian nationalism
NAR prophets still declaring Trump is God’s man, scholar warns
As Trump praises Orbán, new polling data show who supports authoritarian rule in America