Bill Press: Shining a spotlight on media

How times have changed. 

When I began my journalism career at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, there were nine reporters in the investigative journalism department. When I left nine years later, there were zero.

{mosads}And KABC is hardly alone. Because of budget cuts, changing priorities and the shuttering of many daily newspapers, investigative journalism is disappearing from the American news media scene, both print and electronic. 

If you have any doubt about what that means for American journalism, go see the film “Spotlight.” 

It’s a beautiful movie, with Oscar-worthy acting by Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton. It’s also the disgusting story of how the hierarchy of the Catholic Church for decades covered up the sexual abuse of children by hundreds of priests. But mostly it’s the celebration of investigative journalism at its best, as practiced by the “Spotlight” team of The Boston Globe under editor Marty Baron.

How important was their work? Huge. Without The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, we would never have learned about Watergate. Without The Boston Globe’s team of Spotlight reporters, we would never have learned about the pedophile scandal that has rocked the Catholic church across Europe and in more than 100 American cities, with 249 priests, brothers, and nuns accused of sexual abuse of minors in Boston alone.

Unfortunately, investigative reporting teams are shrinking today — or disappearing altogether — as fewer and fewer media outlets have the budget or the backbone to free reporters from the daily grind of chasing the latest car crash or political scandal in order to dig, dig, dig, for weeks or months if necessary, to uncover and report on the really big stories. 

Several nonprofits, like ProPublica, have been founded to take up the slack, but they can’t begin to meet the need. There’s little in-depth reporting on TV networks or cable. And only a handful of newspapers — The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe — have fully staffed and operational investigative reporting departments.

Indeed, it’s the decline in investigative reporting — which Laura Frank, former reporter for Rocky Mountain PBS News, calls “The Withering Watchdog” — that led director Tom McCarthy to make “Spotlight.” 

“The fact that it is eroding should really be a great alarm to people, as much as the ice caps are eroding,” he recently told Salon. “We should be really a bit worried about the state of journalism, and not just for the journalists but for us, because that’s who it will impact most.” 

A sad example of what we can expect in place of hard-hitting, independent investigative journalism recently came to light in Las Vegas, where billionaire Sheldon Adelson bought the Review-Journal. As reported by The New York Times, while negotiations to buy the paper were still underway, three of its reporters were ordered to start monitoring three Nevada judges, one of whom is overseeing a lawsuit against Adelson himself.

That’s what happens when investigative journalism disappears: Bad guys get away with bad stuff. Go see “Spotlight”!

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “The Obama Hate Machine.”