Ten Years After The Boston Globe Spotlight Prostituted Journalism

‘Spotlight’ was a heavily biased film about The Boston Globe coverage of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. The problem with a spotlight is its narrowly focused beam.

July 15, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“prostituted — to use something valuable in a way that is not appropriate or respectable and especially in the pursuit of money.”

— From Merriam Webster’s Dictionary

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The Boston Globe’s pursuit of this story needed a floodlight and not a spotlight. I had a strange experience with the Globe’s coverage in this regard. In 2003 it carried a brief story about a Springfield, Massachusetts couple, Dominic and Briana Martin, who were arrested for a scam attempt involving an elderly local priest. The Martins engaged him in a series of emails about allegations of abuse and then threatened to make the allegations public unless the priest left a sum of money in a brown paper bag in the newspaper kiosk of a local restaurant. The frightened priest, who never had any kind of allegation against him, complied. Then came a second demand, but this time the police set up a sting of their own. They arrested the Martins and charged them with felony extortion.

The Globe seemed to be keeping this story buried and off the Front Page lest it turned some heads relative to the Globe’s ongoing coverage of alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It was just a matter of time before the Globe and other media dropped the word “alleged” from the coverage.

As I read about the Martins extortion racket, I learned only in the last few sentences that Dominic Martin had acquired a new name in the later 1980s. The Globe reported that he was previously known as Todd F.X. Biltcliff, a name I immediately recognized as a person who had accused a priest in my diocese, then received a financial settlement. This was likely not the Martins first attempt at such extortion, but my letter to the Globe reporter and editor went unanswered. No one at the Globe had any interest in exploring this thread any further.

The Boston Globe’s own cashflow problems desperately needed a sordid story to exploit. In 1993, The New Times purchased The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. It was the most expensive newspaper acquisition in U.S. history. By 2013 the Times had launched a search for a buyer for the Globe, which turned out to be a massively losing proposition. The Times finally unloaded the Globe for $70 million. It was a loss of $1.03 billion from its initial investment or, more bluntly, the Globe was sold for less than 10 cents on the dollar from what the Times initially paid for it. The newspaper industry tends not to flout its own foibles, so few people were aware of the massive loss incurred by The New York Times.

In the few years after The Boston Globe’s one-sided exposé of the Archdiocese of Boston, the newspaper’s decline became more evident. In 2016 while the Globe was covering the story of its Spotlight team, and the Best Picture Academy Award the film, “Spotlight” had won, the subscriber list was 115,000 for the daily editions and 205,000 for The Sunday Globe alone. The Alliance for Audited Media today reports a dismal drop in readership down 52 percent since 2019 to a low of 45,000 daily readers of the Globe.

The notion that the Globe was bringing Roman Catholicism to its knees was highly exaggerated. Currently, 24 percent of Greater Boston’s adult population self-reports as Roman Catholic. This is higher than the national average of 19 percent. Combining all other Christian denominations under one umbrella, the Globe claims a 45 percent readership, while 41 percent report no affiliation with any religion at all. Though the Globe’s coverage of Catholic scandal and the scandal itself did indeed cause damage, only a small minority cite the story today as a cause for leaving the Church.

The Globe’s one-sided pursuit of this story drove Cardinal Bernard Law out of Boston and into retirement, but this was greatly exaggerated as being “to evade prosecution.” He was accused of poor judgment, but not of breaking any law. There was a good deal of injustice in the coverage of this story, and I wrote about it once in “Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights.”

My Spotlight Oscar Hangover

This prison in which I am a guest of the State of New Hampshire has a weekend movie program that broadcasts DVD films (mostly donated) each week from Friday through Sunday. I was initially dismayed to see on the posted movie list that ‘Spotlight’ was slated for four prime time showings here. The details of how I came to be in this prison were told by a far greater news outlet and a far less biased news reporter, who was also awarded a Pulitzer for her series of articles. This one was titled, “The Trials of Father MacRae” by Dorothy Rabinowitz (WSJ, May 13, 2013). There were other articles as well in coverage of this story by The Wall Street Journal, but I do not want to make this about my plight.

‘Spotlight,’ you recall, is a film about The Boston Globe’s Spotlight exposé of the priesthood scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. For political as opposed to journalistic reasons, it won “Best Picture” at the 2016 Academy Awards.

I watched “Spotlight” twice because I wanted to be fair and just, and if I were wrong in my judgments of the film and the motivations behind it, I wanted to revisit them. Having sat through the film twice in a single weekend, however, I won’t be retracting anything. To be honest, I actually liked the film. Having grown up in Boston, the landscape and politics of it were more than familiar. What was not familiar, and highly distorted, was the film’s presentation of the Catholic Church and the scandal that took place against the background of the sexual revolution in America, a scandal that had invaded every institution while media coverage was highly selective. Maybe it was just that I knew the subject matter from another perspective, and knew all the players, at least by reputation, from multiple angles, so the film was a very fast two hours for me.

But the film also contained some very troubling distortions. It glorified the journalists involved while casting doubt upon the integrity of just about everyone else. Some of its charges were accurate. For example, the film early on criticized the contingency lawyers who became millionaires by “turning sexual abuse into a cottage industry.” However, the Globe dropped the ball on this and let all the lawyers off the hook. That aspect of the story would go no further in media coverage. Today the Catholic Church in America, and only the Catholic Church, would be singled out for settlements to the tune of (so far) over $4 billion. The lawyers the Globe criticized became multimillionaires and the feeding frenzy at that trough continues unabated to this very day.

Early in the Globe’s coverage of the scandal, Church officials defended themselves by stating that the “non-disclosure” terms so criticized by the reporters were actually demanded by the contingency lawyers and accusers themselves. This was in large part true. In fact, in 2005 when The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote “A Priest’s Story” about my own case (WSJ, April 27, 2005), she got an urgent call from a lawyer for my diocese. His near panic was not over the fact that I, and perhaps some other priests, had been falsely accused, but that The Wall Street Journal had named names of accusers after the lawyers agreed to the non-disclosure demands. It was I who provided those names. I was never a party to any such agreement, and I would never publicly disclose the name of an actual victim of sexual abuse.

But the bigger scandal is that the Globe and it’s Spotlight Team did nothing to follow up on the role lawyers continued to play. That is one of the real coverups in this story and it continues. The film had clear allusions that Boston lawyer Eric MacLeish, for example, became wealthy representing claimants, filing demands, and keeping it all out of the news media before the Spotlight Team got hold of the story.

But when the story was over, and the Globe had its prize — the forced resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law — the spotlight stayed on the Church but left the lawyers alone to continue business as usual.

There was a big problem with The Boston Globe’s crusade. It made no distinction whatsoever between real crimes with real evidence and mere accusations with real fraud behind them. The ‘Spotlight’ film glossed over this, treating every claim without question as demonstrably true. In her bold article, “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ is a Terrible Film” (which also profiled my own case) journalist JoAnn Wypijewski taught the Spotlight Team a lesson in journalistic integrity:

“I am astonished that, across the past few months, ever since ‘Spotlight’ hit theatres, otherwise serious left-of-center people have peppered their conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we need more of… What editor Marty Baron and the Globe sparked with their 600 stories and their confidential tip line for grievances was not laudatory journalism, but a moral panic, and unfortunately for those telling the truth, truth was its casualty.”

— JoAnn Wypijewski, CounterPunch

Well after the Globe Spotlight Team criticized the lawyers for turning abuse into a “cottage industry,” David F. Pierre, Jr. of TheMediaReport.com followed up with his book, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, exposing what “business as usual” looked like beyond the glare of the Globe’s Spotlight:

“A year later, in 2002, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, faced accusations from 62 individuals. Rather than spending the time and the resources looking into the merits of the accusations, ‘Diocesan officials did not even ask for specifics such as dates and specific allegations for the claims,’ New Hampshire’s Union Leader reported. ‘Some victims made claims in the past month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days,’ reported the Nashua Telegraph [quoting lawyer Peter Hutchins]. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’ a pleased and much richer plaintiff attorney admitted.”

— Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, p. 80

David F. Pierre, Jr.’s book has a chapter analyzing five categories of false accusations against priests: 1. The “repressed memory” accusation; 2. The “dead priest” accusation; 3. The “me too” accusation; 4. Simple criminal fraud; and 5. Psychological illness. The above scenario with plaintiff lawyers bringing claims unfiled in any court, and church lawyers offering settlements with absolutely no findings of facts while hiding the names of accusers, was all placed by David F. Pierre, Jr. in the category of “simple criminal fraud.” The Globe Spotlight Team might have noted this too had it taken a moment to focus its spotlight just a little off the real target of its crusade.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Another journalist of outstanding integrity also covered this story with truth and justice in 2016. It was published at CounterPunch then, but I am reprinting it here with permission of the author. It is more or less an autopsy of “Spotlight.” Though I never appeared in the film, I have a prominent role in its autopsy. We published it anew in our “Voices from Beyond” feature. Justice requires that we give equal time to “Oscar Hangover Special: Why “Spotlight” Is a Terrible Film.”

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.”