The Public Has The Right To Know

An Essay on Media Activism by Jared Jones

Poverty and gender norms plagued many of the Catholic Priests’ victims in the film “Spotlight” however the viewer would not have known what was going to unfold a newspaper’s suit for sealed documents. In the cases against priests with child molestation allegations, the press fights to make records public for the general public to know what happened in hundreds of claims in a massive church scandal. Though the primary function of this small group was to focus on the task of writing for the newspaper, through their commitment to media activism they also helped a community learn about its inhabitants and receive emotional support for its inhabitants who felt that justice wasn't proper.

The textbook states in the Communication and the Media chapter, “In this country, accountability is a function of media oversight, media activism, and movie and television programming guidelines.” and the team of dedicated journalists felt the need of media activism principally. “People who are concerned about the media content may make their voices heard in the form of media activism, coordinated efforts to express displeasure with media messages and to force changes in their content.” the textbook says, and the journalist in the film did just that when it came to pursuing the case to inform the Boston community.

“Spotlight” followed a four-person investigative journalist team at the Boston Globe, a Boston-based newspaper, whose purpose was to fulfill communication needs for information and social integration. In their pursuit to challenge the protective order in a case versus Cardinal Law, the journalist team “Spotlight,” after digging through many avenues of sources, determined that the people of Boston had a right to know about the misconduct and coverings of the Catholic priests in their city.

According to the textbook and its definition and insight about the agenda-setting theory, “media tells people what to think about by determining what they watch, read, and hear. By giving attention to a topic, that is, the media put that topic in the public’s “agenda,” making it relevant to public discussion. One implication of that is the media coverage can increase awareness- and even distort perceptions- of an issue.” By these facts stated in the textbook, the church used the agenda-setting theory to cover up stories for seventy priests. The existence of what was indeed occurring in the community is priests were committing acts of physical abuse, as well as spiritual abuse, to adolescent children. Instead of addressing the claims adequately, once a victim came forth with allegations, the church conspired with media to hide the applications to maintain a blurred distinction in people’s minds that religion was still the best for them.

With fifty-three percent of the newspaper’s reader base being of the Catholic faith, when allegations of child molestation surfaced against the priest throughout the Boston area, law official and representatives buried the case or discouraged many of the media executives from running substantial news coverage on the subject matter. While an astonishingly amount of their colleagues, peers, and officials were apart of the overall cover-up that was actively still occurring, these journalists set out to dispel the Catholic churches feats of fostering Catholic priest; With claims of molestation of children disassembling the image of the Catholic church by families. By only seeing the “good acts” in the community of the Church, the Catholic church had curated a picture of an organized and protected religion.

In the section of Selective Exposure, the text states that selective exposure is “ a process whereby we seek media messages that match our values rather than those that do not.”
The textbook discusses the concept in regards to advertisers, politicians, and anyone with a mass message curating the message for individuals. One of the characters states to another in an off-the-record chat that the “Church thinks in centuries” he said as a claim as to why his associate shouldn’t pursue the case against the church, referring to the material means the church possessed.

In 84 suits against priests by victims and families of psychosexual stupefy, the ordeal was described as a “recognizable psychiatric phenomenon” since priests were targeting adolescent children from homes with absent fathers and economic hardships. During the unearthing of the churches discourse, in the trial duration, the “Spotlight” team served many functions for the Boston community by making contributions to the community through media activism and executing the purposes of its initial formation.