Sins of the Press: David and the Truth About Goliath
In his book, Sins of the Press, Catholic writer and media equalizer David F Pierre Jr, takes aim at a news Goliath: The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-endorsed Prejudice.
October 15, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
Do you remember Robert McCall? He was The Equalizer, a retired espionage operative in a popular 1980s TV series. It was never clear whether he was CIA or MI6, but each week he placed his formidable skills in the service of some underdog up against powerful oppressors. With British actor Edward Woodward in the role of Robert McCall, The Equalizer managed to even the odds against a perfect storm of tyranny. He appeared rather benign, and at times he seemed a bit in over his head, but he was patient and bided his time. When he struck, the powerful and powerfully corrupt were unmasked and undone.
In a world of media atrocities, David F. Pierre, Jr. aims to be an equalizer. With the patience of Job, he waited a dozen years before loading his small stone of an expository book into a sling to take aim at a media Goliath, in this case The Boston Globe and its 2003 Pulitzer Prize for — don’t miss the irony in this — “Public Service.” Here’s how the Pulitzer Committee described its 2003 award to The Boston Globe…
“… for its courageous, comprehensive coverage of sexual abuse by priests, an effort that pierced secrecy, stirred local, national, and international reaction, and produced changes in the Roman Catholic Church.”
I found that description by the 2003 Pulitzer Committee to be incredibly tragic and sad. The recipients of that Pulitzer, The Boston Globe and its Spotlight Team, had an opportunity to pierce entrenched secrecy, to stir long dormant local, national and international reaction, and to produce substantive changes in the epidemic of sexual abuse from which millions in this culture have suffered. Indeed, that would have been a public service.
But the Globe let that opportunity pass for the creation of a moral panic aimed exclusively at the Catholic Church, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee chose to underwrite that fraud. It was an adventure in media narcissism, and David F. Pierre, Jr. struck the eye of that self-serving Goliath in Sins of the Press: The Untold Story of The Boston Globe's Reporting on Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church.
His publication of this book was timely. In the same year of the book’s release, Hollywood released its own version of The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-endorsed prejudice with the film, “Spotlight” written by Thomas McCarthy, who also directed, and Josh Singer. Some have suggested that the film was on a par with the great 1976 Oscar winner, All the President’s Men that explored The Washington Post’s dogged pursuit of President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. The claim was ludicrous.
David Pierre posted an exclusive here two weeks ago in “Hidden Evil: The Anti-Catholic Agenda of Bishop Accountability.” It exposed another venomous venue, Bishop Accountability, which was far more interested in exploiting Catholic scandal than covering the truth about child abuse. Sins of the Press, in contrast, was focused on The Boston Globe’s coverage of Catholic scandal which was aimed solely for the purpose of destroying one of the most important pillars of Boston, Massachusetts, its Catholicism.
On page after page of Sins of the Press, Pierre presents clear and compelling evidence of the Globe’s reckless disservice to humanity in its shameless pursuit of Catholic priests. Like David Pierre’s previous books, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, and Double Standard, Sins of the Press is right on point without its author telling us what to think about the sordid revelations it contains. He lets the facts speak for themselves, and they do, quite loudly, sometimes with echoes that resounded in my soul and psyche for days.
Mr. Pierre was not the first to take on the Globe’s reckless and destructive pursuit of Catholic priests and their due process rights. Several years before Sins of the Press was written, we published at Beyond These Stone Walls, “The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe.” Father Menna was an 81-year-old priest in the Archdiocese of Boston living out his senior years in a rectory with other priests while he served, as best he could, a parish that loved him dearly. Then out of the blue in 2007 came a single, vague allegation against him — there had never been another before or since — that The Boston Globe exploited mercilessly while allowing its readers to believe that the allegation was something that had just taken place. In truth, it was claimed to have happened 53 years earlier and like all such claims it was settled with no regard for Father Menna’s due process rights or well-being. Thanks to the Globe’s one-sided account, Father Menna was driven out of the priesthood at age 83 and died from a broken heart. Where was the Spotlight on that?
A Spotlight When We Needed a Floodlight
What The Boston Globe did, and what the Pulitzer Prize Committee honored for the Globe’s Spotlight coverage, was patently reckless, unjust, and dishonest, not only about the Catholic Church and priests, but also about the tragic and silenced majority of victims of sexual abuse. Dave Pierre’s book exposes one media tenet clearly: “If a priest didn’t do it, we’re not interested!”
The reader is left with no doubt that the harsh glare of a spotlight brought to bear by The Boston Globe was meant for a singular purpose, to isolate the Catholic Church and priesthood as a sort of special locus of sexual abuse. At the same time, the Globe accommodated by omission the prevalence of sexual abuse in other institutions throughout not only Boston, but the nation. A spotlight leaves a lot in the dark, whereas a floodlight is all-inclusive.
A case in point, one very familiar to our readers, is the story of what happened to Pornchai Moontri. The worst of it took place in New England, and the State of Maine, well within The Boston Globe’s coverage area. Pornchai Moontri was taken from his home in rural Thailand at age 11 and brought to Bangor, Maine, where he suffered years of horrific sexual abuse and violence. At one point he escaped only to be handed back over to his abuser by police. Having never been exposed to English, Pornchai could not articulate what had been happening to him. Then his mother was murdered, from all appearances by the same man who exploited Pornchai. He escaped into the streets as a teen where he lived under a bridge and homeless. During a struggle with a much larger man, Pornchai killed him in desperation, and was sent to life in prison with no defense. He ended up in a cell with me, and on April 10, 2010 he became a Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday. As Pornchai much later wrote, “I could not believe all the stories of repressed memory and demands for huge amounts of money, by those who were accusing Catholic priests. I came to the Catholic Church for healing and hope, and found both. The grace of my recovery came from a priest who was falsely accused and I came to know that with every fiber of my being. He led me out of darkness into a wonderful light.”
With help from Clare Farr, an Australia attorney who read of Pornchai’s story and took an interest, we scoured cyberspace to find Pornchai’s abuser and bring him to justice. After reading what I wrote (linked at the end of this post), detectives from Maine came to interview Pornchai. On a second interview they brought the District Attorney. Pornchai’s abuser was found in Oregon and he was charged with 40 felony counts of child sexual abuse in Penobscot County Superior Court in Maine. On September 18, 2018 Richard Alan Bailey entered a plea of no contest on all counts. He was found guilty on all of them, but sentenced only to 18 years probation. There was no outrage, not even a sign that anyone noticed. The Boston Globe had zero interest in this story. There was just no cash to be had or Roman collar to be destroyed.
In September 2020, Pornchai was taken into custody by ICE and deported to his native Thailand. Hollywood called the Globe’s Oscar-winning film Spotlight. In a perverted sort of way, that was appropriate because it left in darkness, under shrouds of ignorance the real damage that had been done.
Losing the News
The Boston Globe Spotlight Team accomplished its goal with the creation of a perfect storm of moral panic. The paper’s spin presented every claim and accusation as demonstrably true, reported every settlement as evidence of guilt, spun decades-old claims to make them look as though they occurred yesterday, and never once questioned the financial motives of accusers.
In this arena, the Globe assisted in the continued abuse suffered by real victims by repeatedly giving a platform to personal injury lawyers who stood to pocket forty percent of every settlement wrested from a beleaguered and bludgeoned hierarchy while the millions abused in non-Catholic venues suffered in silence. The Globe’s “public service” was mostly to contingency lawyers.
Not all in the media were onboard with this. Writing for the contentious media platform, CounterPunch, columnist Joanne Wypijewski crowned her long career in journalism as a staff writer for The Nation with her own counter punch entitled “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.” For full transparency, much of her article was about the case against me. Armed with some healthy skepticism, the most important tool in her journalistic arsenal, she began her article thusly:
“I don’t “believe the victims”.
“I was in Boston in the Spring of 2002 reporting on the priest scandal, and because I know some of what is untrue, I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers or the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team or the Catholic “faithful” who became harpies outside Boston churches, carrying signs with images of Satan, hurling invective at congregants who’d just attended Mass, and at least once — this in my presence — spitting in the face of a person who dared dispute them.
“I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this.
“And I am astonished (though I suppose I shouldn’t be) that, across the past few months, ever since Spotlight hit theaters, otherwise serious left-of-center people have peppered their party conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we all need more of.”
The lawyers, the Globe, and the seemingly endless parade of “John Does” all seemed to be on the same page in this, and it was always the front page. None of them reported that Father Dominic Menna, for example, never had any prior accusation, and that the one that destroyed his priesthood was claimed to have happened 53 years earlier and built on a dubious claim of repressed and recovered memory, a fraud that in this arena would go on to transform many lawyers into millionaires.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, less than half of Americans said that losing their local newspaper would harm civic life. Less than one third responded that they would miss their local newspaper if it just disappeared. Ken Paulson, President of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors published an interesting column for USA Today entitled “News Media Lose Trust, Gain Allies.” Mr. Paulson cited a “State of the First Amendment Survey” with dismal results for those in the news media whose careers have been built upon reputable journalism. In the survey results, just 24% of respondents believe that the news media try to report the news without bias. That figure is down from 41% just a year earlier. However, 69% state that journalists in the news media should act in a watchdog role in reporting on government. That figure was down from 80% a year earlier. The first figure — the fact that only 24% of those surveyed believe the news media reports without bias — is alarming, and a record low for this decade-long poll. The second figure — indicating a decline in the sense that the media acts in a watchdog role — was surprising to Mr. Paulson who reported that “This nation’s founding generation insisted on a free press to act as a check on a strong central government … an enduring principle over centuries.” He added, however,
“Social media posts that call out unfairness and injustice don’t diminish this critical watchdog role. It just means a free press has many more allies.”
David F. Pierre, Jr. is one of those allies. His book, Sins of the Press is a David v. Goliath account that takes needed aim at The Boston Globe’s bias, and that is a good thing. The release of Spotlight, Hollywood’s version of this sordid story, felt a lot more like the Globe’s epitaph than any celebration of its dubious public service.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. I thank David F. Pierre, Jr. and commend him for his journalistic courage and integrity. You may review his work at TheMediaReport.com.
You may also like these related posts at Beyond These Stone Walls:
Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam
The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek
Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights
Hidden Evil: The Anti-Catholic Agenda of Bishop Accountability
Illumination From Down Under: Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast
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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”