A small newspaper team spends a year proving that the Catholic Church in Boston hid decades of child abuse by priests — and every fact in this story is true.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Tom McCarthy's Spotlight (2015). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; this is history, and we're here to talk about it. The subject is serious, so we'll keep our focus where the film keeps it: on the cover-up and the reporting, not on the abuse itself.)
In 2001, the Boston Globe hires a new editor, Marty Baron — an outsider who has never lived in Boston and isn't Catholic, in a city where almost everyone is. In one of his first weeks, he reads a small column about a lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, who represents several people saying a priest named John Geoghan abused them as children — and that the Archdiocese of Boston knew about it for years and simply moved him from parish to parish rather than stopping him.
Baron asks the paper's small investigative unit, Spotlight — led by veteran reporter Robby Robinson, alongside Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll — to look into it properly. He also does something the team finds strange: he tells them to sue the Church for access to sealed court documents. At first, the team assumes this is a story about one bad priest and a paper trail that ends with him.
It doesn't take long to see they're wrong. Survivors of abuse — now adults — start describing the same pattern, independently of one another: a priest, a quiet complaint to Church officials, then a sudden transfer to a new parish, where nothing was ever explained to the families there.
1. Who is Marty Baron, and what does he ask the Spotlight team to do?
2. What pattern do survivors start to describe, independently of each other?
1. He's the Boston Globe's new outside editor; he asks the Spotlight team to properly investigate lawyer Mitchell Garabedian's claim that the Archdiocese knew about a priest, John Geoghan, and moved him between parishes instead of stopping him — and to sue for access to sealed Church documents.
2. A priest abuses a child, a quiet complaint reaches Church officials, and the priest is transferred to a new parish with no warning to anyone there — the same pattern, repeated.
As the reporters dig, the story stops being about one priest. Matt Carroll builds a database from old Church directories, cross-checking priests who were repeatedly listed as being on "sick leave" or "unassigned" — a pattern that, again and again, lines up with the years survivors say they were abused. The list of names starts to grow: not two or three priests, but a number that unsettles even the reporters.
The Church resists at every turn. Its lawyers fight to keep the most damaging documents sealed; a culture of deference in the city makes some sources reluctant to talk, and even a few of Spotlight's own colleagues once passed on similar tips years earlier without following up. Then, on the very morning the team is ready to push harder, the September 11 attacks happen, and the story is set aside for months while the paper covers the unfolding national tragedy.
When the team returns to it, Robinson admits something uncomfortable: the paper itself had been handed pieces of this story before, over the years, and hadn't done enough with them. Getting it right now means being honest about that failure too.
1. How does Matt Carroll help the team see the true scale of the problem?
2. What two things interrupt or complicate the investigation?
1. He builds a database from Church directories, spotting priests repeatedly marked "on leave" or "unassigned" in ways that match the years of alleged abuse — turning scattered names into a real, growing pattern.
2. The Church's lawyers fight to keep documents sealed and the city's deference makes sources reluctant to talk; then the September 11 attacks force the paper to set the story aside for months.
In January 2002, the Globe finally publishes — not a story about one priest, but about the system that protected him and dozens like him. The first article names Cardinal Bernard Law directly, showing that Church leadership had documented evidence of abuse allegations and moved the priests anyway. The team had feared the story might be ignored, or that the city would turn against them for attacking its most trusted institution.
Instead, the opposite happens. The paper's phone lines are flooded with calls from more survivors, many of whom had never told anyone before. Week after week, the Globe publishes follow-up stories, and the number of accused priests in the Boston area alone grows from a handful to dozens, then far higher, as the true scale of decades of cover-up becomes impossible to deny.
By the end of the year, Cardinal Law resigns. The story doesn't stay in Boston: other newspapers, and eventually other countries, start asking the same questions about their own dioceses. Spotlight's closing text makes the point plainly — this had been happening, and being hidden, almost everywhere.
1. What does the Globe's first story, in January 2002, actually prove — and about whom?
2. What happens to the number of accused priests after the first story runs, and what happens to Cardinal Law?
1. It proves that Cardinal Bernard Law and the Archdiocese's leadership knew about abuse allegations against priests and moved them between parishes instead of stopping them or reporting them.
2. The number climbs from a handful to dozens and then far higher as more survivors come forward; Cardinal Law resigns before the end of 2002.
No story needs this tense more than Spotlight. The present perfect links something in the past directly to right now — exactly what you need to describe a truth that has been buried for years and is only now coming to light.
Read the meaning in brackets and complete the sentence.
1. So far, the reporters (identify) more than a dozen suspicious cases. (a countable, completed result)
2. Survivors (wait) for someone to listen to them for over twenty years. (a long, ongoing effort)
3. The archdiocese's lawyers (know) about the sealed files since the original lawsuit. (a state continuing up to now)
1. have identified (present perfect simple — a counted result)
2. have been waiting (present perfect continuous — ongoing duration)
3. have known (present perfect simple — a state verb, even with "since")
Each sentence has the right idea but the wrong form. Write the corrected verb phrase.
1. The team is investigating this story since early autumn. (continuing action)
2. The newspaper has print three follow-up articles this week. (right tense, wrong participle)
3. Robby is knowing about this pattern for years, but nobody followed it up. (a state verb)
1. has been investigating (present perfect continuous)
2. has printed (present perfect simple)
3. has known (present perfect simple — no continuous with a state verb)
Fill each gap with a present perfect simple or continuous verb, or for/since. Read it aloud when you're done.
"We (chase) small stories about this one priest years," Robby says, "but the paper never (ask) how many others there really are. The families (wait) for someone to listen the eighties."
have been chasing · for · has never asked · have been waiting · since
Notice the pattern: a finished, countable result uses the simple form; an ongoing effort over time uses the continuous form — and for measures a length of time, since names the starting point.
Carry this into the Speak tab — the whole story of Spotlight lives in the gap between what the Church has known for decades and what the public has only just found out.
Here's what makes Spotlight unusual among films about journalism: almost everything in it happened. The real Boston Globe Spotlight team, the real editor, the real lawyer, and the real cover-up are all part of the public record.
Marty Baron really did become the Boston Globe's editor in 2001, and really did push the paper's small investigative unit, Spotlight, to sue for sealed Church documents. The team was led by Walter "Robby" Robinson, alongside reporters Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer and Matt Carroll, with editor Ben Bradlee Jr. The lawyer Mitchell Garabedian had spent years representing survivors and arguing that Cardinal Bernard Law's own office had documented evidence of abuse — and had moved the accused priests instead of removing them from ministry.
The film is honest about how real investigative journalism works, and that's the part worth studying as closely as the history. The Spotlight team didn't rely on any single survivor's account, however credible; they built the story from public directories that showed priests repeatedly marked "on sick leave" or "absent" in ways that matched the years of alleged abuse, and from a long legal fight to unseal court records that the Archdiocese's lawyers had fought hard to keep closed. Only when dozens of separate accounts, filed years apart by people who had never met each other, described the very same pattern — a complaint, a transfer, silence — did the story become undeniable.
That combination — documents plus pattern plus independent corroboration — is the real method the film is quietly teaching, and it is the same method behind most major investigative journalism, then and now.
The Boston Globe published its first story on 6 January 2002. Reporting through that year eventually showed that the pattern reached far beyond one priest: the Globe's ongoing investigation identified roughly 249 priests and brothers in the Boston Archdiocese accused of abuse over decades, involving more than 1,000 victims — numbers that only became fully clear as more survivors came forward after the initial story ran. Cardinal Bernard Law resigned in December 2002. In 2003, the Globe's Spotlight team won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, journalism's highest honour, for the investigation. The reporting didn't stay local — it prompted new investigations into the Catholic Church's handling of abuse allegations in dioceses across the United States and in other countries, a pattern the film's own closing text lists city by city.
The film compresses some events and timelines for drama — Cardinal Law's documented knowledge, for instance, emerged gradually through several batches of unsealed records, not in one single moment — but it does not invent the cover-up, the scale, or the outcome. Where it simplifies, it simplifies a true story; it does not distort it.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of Spotlight in your own words, as if to someone who's never seen it. Move through the arc: a new editor's quiet question → survivors describing the same hidden pattern → the fight to unseal the files, interrupted by September 11 → the January 2002 story that names Cardinal Law → the flood of new survivors and the Cardinal's resignation.
Work in at least five key words (conceal, cover-up, systemic, complicit, corroborate, whistleblower, stonewall, dogged, accountability, reckoning), and use present perfect simple/continuous with for/since when you describe how long the cover-up lasted: "the Church has covered this up for decades."
The reporters attack the single institution their own city trusts and loves the most, knowing it will divide families and colleagues who would rather the story stayed buried. Build an argument: is exposing a trusted institution's wrongdoing always worth the damage it does to a community's sense of itself — or can the cost of "the truth coming out" sometimes be too high? Bring in other examples you know — governments, companies, sports organisations, schools.
Spotlight argues that a free press with enough time, resources and independence can expose what even courts and whole communities had failed to face. Is investigative journalism still capable of doing that today, or has something changed? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: