'Spotlight' -- more than a great newspaper story -- Nov. 24, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

One of the best movies of the year portrays an unlikely hero, a newspaper.

“Spotlight” is based on the true story of The Boston Globe’s painstaking investigation, starting in 2001, into child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Boston that was covered up for decades by local church leaders.

While not a documentary, the movie uses real names and works for verisimilitude. It keeps its focus on journalism and on how three hard-working reporters – Sacha Pfeiffer, Mike Rezendes and Matt Carroll -- and editor Walter “Robby” Robinson doggedly pursued the truth and a story that was bigger than anyone imagined.

While it does not show abuse, “Spotlight” is rated R and contains what The New York Times review called “graphic descriptions of despicable acts; language not fit for print.”

It’s being compared to “All the President’s Men.” That 1976 movie about dashing young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s uncovering the truth behind the Watergate break-in for The Washington Post was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four. It inspired a generation of reporters.

Those still working at newspapers have seen their newsrooms shrink around them like melting ice floes as newspapers struggle to survive in the digital age. Many papers have shut down their investigative staffs to cut costs. Surveys, though, show readers want in-depth reporting.

Perhaps coincidentally, trust in newspapers has ebbed to near-historic lows, Gallup reports. Could a movie turn that trend around? Probably not, although the Los Angeles Times announced this month that it’s restarting its investigative team.

“Spotlight” takes place 14 years ago as the Internet is just taking off. A billboard over the Globe’s parking lot trumpets “AOL Anywhere.”  When the Globe gets a new top editor, Marty Baron, reporters worry about layoffs.

Baron reads a local column about a pedophile priest and puts the Spotlight team on the story. The movie traces the team for five months as the reporters and editor work the old-fashioned way. 

They comb through stacks of paper clips from the newspaper “morgue” and check names by hand in old diocesan directories. They knock on doors that sometimes slam in their faces. They track down sealed court documents.

Instead of a few isolated cases, they discover that up to 90 pedophile priests in Boston have been protected by the church over the years.

The movie ends with publication of the first story on Jan. 6, 2002, about one predatory priest and the extensive cover-up. The Globe expanded the team and wrote 600 follow-up stories on the scandal that year, detailing how priests were shuffled from parish to parish, and victims’ families were given secret payments in return for silence.

More than 250 priests and brothers in Boston have been accused of abusing minors.

The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for its “courageous, comprehensive coverage.”

“Spotlight” doesn’t flinch in showing how the Globe earlier missed what became its biggest story. Years before, a victim gave information about abuse, but the paper downplayed it until Baron, who was neither from Boston nor Catholic, unleashed the investigative team.  

The team could have done nothing, however, without the courageous abuse victims who, one by one, agreed to share their horrifying stories in print. The paper also posted church documents online, so that readers could see the cover-up for themselves.

The Globe’s work led to the resignation of Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and the uncovering of a worldwide scandal that still continues. At the end of the movie, several screens list hundreds of cities and towns here and around the world where sexual abuse by priests has been reported. Among them is Richmond, where the Times-Dispatch has reported on cases.

To learn more, www.Bishop-Accountability.org tracks cases of sexual abuse by priests.

When Pope Francis visited the United States in September, he met with a small group of victims of child sexual abuse and said “God weeps” for them.

“Spotlight” reminds us of the timeless value of investigative reporting by newspapers that are still doing this important work. And they’re not all metropolitan papers like the Globe.

The Bristol Herald Courier won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2010 for a series on natural gas companies withholding royalty payments from Southwest Virginia landowners.  

In the deadline-driven Internet age, we’re fortunate that independent nonprofits such as ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity have taken on the mission of investigative journalism. We need comprehensive reporting that takes time. We need the truth.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

Who's driving now? Ooops, we're still human -- June 11, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I learned as a rookie newspaper reporter that there are no accidents in life – none involving cars, trucks or motorcycles, anyway.  

“Accident” implies an event that’s beyond our control. Because reporters cannot know what’s in a driver’s mind, we can’t say something is an accident.

Newspapers that shunned the A word reported on automotive mishaps, incidents and collisions. Blow-dried TV announcers and traffic reporters shouting over helicopter noise favored the more vivid noun crash. 

Copy editors weren’t the only sticklers for the right word to describe highway misfortune. Years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tried to expunge the concept of traffic accidents.

By eliminating the word in speeches, news releases and publications, it hoped in 1997 to re-educate people that car wrecks weren’t acts of God but predictable and preventable events.

The agency also launched a “Crashes are not accidents” campaign. From time to time, other groups have taken up the cause, but people hang onto the idea of tragic highway accidents. Now, though, while we can’t stop the lethal combination of speed and distance, we at least buckle our seat belts.

Technology is making cars safer. Backup cameras help you park and avoid pedestrians. Lasers or radar in adaptive cruise control keep your car a safe distance from the one ahead and warn if you veer out of your lane.

But what happens when technology – and not a human -- controls the car?    

This summer, Google will test the prototype of its fully self-driving car on city streets in Mountain View, Calif. The cautious two-seater won’t exceed the grand speed of 25 mph. Other companies working on driverless cars include General Motors, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and the Chinese Web company Baidu.   

States are eager to get on board. Michigan, Florida, Nevada and Washington, D.C., have passed laws allowing automakers to test driverless cars. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe in March proclaimed the commonwealth “open for business” for the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

In Northern Virginia, 70 miles of busy highways – parts of Interstates 66, 95 and 495 and U.S. Routes 29 and 50 -- could be used to test self-driving cars within a year, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported June 1.

  

The potential for safer highway travel has instant appeal. Autonomous vehicles don’t drive drunk or send texts or take selfies behind the wheel. But they do have to deal with humans in other cars.

Since Google began testing self-driving cars in 2009, the vehicles have logged nearly 2 million miles with a dozen minor accidents – but “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” the company announced. Other motorists rear-ended or sideswiped the autonomous car, or the car was in manual mode and its human driver at fault. 

The cars don’t have to be perfect; they just have to beat humans at driving, developers say. But that seems a low bar. Humans are terrible drivers.

In 2010, there were 33,000 traffic deaths, nearly 4 million injuries and 24 million vehicles damaged in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, the highway traffic safety administration reported last month. It still avoids the word accident.

Meanwhile, states are struggling with new rules of the road. California allows self-driving cars on public roads but requires a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator – and a trained safety driver who can take over in case there’s a problem.

That may lead to a false sense of security. Google in the fall of 2012 started letting its employees take home self-driving Lexus SUVs. The employees promised to be ever-alert and take the wheel as necessary. It didn’t work out.  

“We discovered something we really hadn’t seen coming but was obvious in retrospect,” Astro Teller, the improbably named director of Google’s Project X, the division that explores innovative products,  said last month in a South by Southwest talk.  

“Once people trust the system, they trust it. Our success was itself a failure,” he said. “The assumption that people can be a reliable backup for the system was a total fallacy.”

The only way a driverless car will work, Google decided, is to make it totally driverless. No steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator. The car must drive itself from Point A to Point B at the push of a button.

“That has been a lot more work than we thought, but it’s the right thing to do,” Teller said.

Google’s decision to adjust the technology to fit the human – rather than expecting the human to adjust to the technology -- is a good lesson for us all. Experiment, yes, and take the time for safety. Crashes are not accidents. 

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Retire the penny, please -- April 11, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Washington is obsessed with trillions, but it’s the lowly penny that’s weighing us down.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday sent Congress a budget plan to spend almost $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. Can anyone fathom one trillion, let alone nearly four? How about a measly billion?

Pennies we get. Not from heaven, but hand to hand. They are heavy in our pockets and wallets. Pennies clutter our dresser tops. Pennies fill old coffee cans and nest between sofa cushions. Pennies are a burden – small and needless.

It costs twice as much to produce a penny as it’s worth. In fiscal year 2012, pennies cost taxpayers $58 million. That’s hardly big bucks as far as federal spending goes, but why are we doing this?

Nearly everyone agrees the penny has outlived its usefulness. A penny buys nothing, not even penny candy. Many times I’ve heard the dramatic sighs of those behind me when I’ve dug deep to find the right change. Pennies aren’t even good for checking tire tread anymore. Better to use a quarter for today’s tires, retailers say.

The president says the penny is an apt symbol of what ails Washington. He was asked in a Google+ hangout “fireside chat” in February why we don’t stop minting pennies – as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have done.

“Any time we’re spending more money on something that people don’t actually use – that’s an example of something we should probably change,” he replied.

“One of the things you see chronically in government: It’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work, so we can invest in the things that do. So the penny becomes a good metaphor for a lot of the problems that we’ve got,” he added.

I love a metaphor as much as the next English major, but why prolong our penny foolishness? Obama could have used his budget to declare our independence from the tyranny of pennies.

Instead, on page 144, the budget calls for the U.S. Mint to “change the composition of coins to more cost-effective materials, given that the current cost of making the penny is 2 cents and the cost of making the nickel is 11 cents.”

That’s right. To, um, coin a phrase, the 5-cent piece is nickeling us. We spent $51.2 million on nickels last year.

As for changing the content of coins, we’ve already adulterated the penny from all copper to 2.5 percent copper. It’s 97.5 percent zinc.

Obama recognizes that people are emotionally attached to pennies. They remember their childhood piggybanks and cashing in pennies for a dollar or two, he said.

Nostalgia didn’t stop the Royal Canadian Mint from ceasing production and distribution of pennies in February. Customers can still use the Canadian penny. The government’s Rounding Guidelines suggest that businesses round cash transactions to the nearest nickel. Credit, debit and check purchases are still in penny increments.

In 1857, the United States did kill a penny – a half penny, to be precise. It was the first coin the nation ever authorized and production started in 1793. People surely were sentimentally attached to it. It was worth what a dime is now, far more than the lowly penny is today.

For decades, smart people have said it’s time to retire the penny. My late friend and colleague Charley McDowell, beloved Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist, wrote in 1990:

“I, for one, am willing to do away with pennies even if merchants ease the prices only up, not down, to the nearest nickel. The percentage of general price increase…will not be great. Anyway, relief from pennies would be worth it.”

I wondered what Charley would have said about the couple in Chicago who tiled their bedroom in pennies recently, saying it was cheaper than using regular tile. As for me, I lugged 47 wrapped rolls of pennies to the bank.

The young teller was gracious, but his friend at the next window wore the smirk of a boy who can’t believe his luck when the teacher skips him and asks the next kid to solve the equation.

My teller counted and recounted the rolls. Pennies steal time and energy, even wrapped. He asked how I wanted my loot. I did not say I wanted nickels.

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.