Walter V. Robinson

Behind the Spotlight

A trio of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists have helped the Boston Globe expose society's darkest corners

By Bill Kirtz

News flash: People have less and less trust in the press.

And why shouldn't they, as red-faced editors denounce their staffers' fabrications, plagiarisms, and inaccuracies. Meanwhile, back at the executive ranch, media moguls conflate news and entertainment, and inflate profits by trimming editorial ranks.

Yet amid all the controversies and constraints, some reporters still excel the old-fashioned way, digging through records, patiently cultivating sources, and honoring their profession’s traditional pledge to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Take the Boston Globe’s exhaustive, explosive coverage of the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The eighteen-month, 900-story effort by the paper’s Spotlight Team challenged and changed an institution. It also earned a raft of top journalism awards, including this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Overseeing the investigation was Spotlight editor Walter V. Robinson, LA’74, a newsroom star since joining the Globe just out of Northeastern. His team included reporter Matthew Carroll, LA’79, who created databases that cross-referenced priests, parishes, and leaves of absence to show how the Boston archdiocese had moved sex offenders from venue to venue.

As they pursued leads and nailed down details, Robinson and Carroll traveled a path paved years earlier by another alumnus, former Globe editor in chief John Driscoll, LA’57. Not only did Driscoll introduce the young Robinson to investigative reporting, he himself helped the paper win three Pulitzers—in 1972, for uncovering corruption in Somerville; in 1975, for a massive and balanced look at Boston’s school desegregation crisis; and in 1984, for a series that examined race relations, which included a candid examination of his own newsroom.

According to Driscoll, the Globe’s latest accolades and journalism’s current tribulations underscore time-honored newsroom principles: Double-check facts. Distrust unnamed sources. And support investigative reporting, despite its costs and the irritation it causes local icons.

In a topsy-turvy media world, where the “profiteers are winning big-time” and too few publishers care about the communities they cover, “journalism is still the greatest business there is,” Driscoll says.

Facts, not flair

Robinson seconds that sentiment. As Spotlight editor, he supervises a team of reporters freed from routine assignments to concentrate on long-term investigations. (For some stories, including the clergy abuse series, the team is augmented with reporters from around the newsroom.)

This job, he figures, is his seventeenth at the Globe. He’s also covered four presidential elections, headed the Middle East and City Hall bureaus, and served as city editor and metropolitan editor.

“I’ve never gotten stale,” Robinson says. “I still believe this is the most fun you can have and get paid for it. I can’t wait to get up in the morning and come in. The idea that I can find out really important information that everybody has the right to know—I should pay them.”

No newspaper pays ex–New York Times reporters Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg anymore. Revelations of Blair’s résumé inflation, plagiarism, and invention of anonymous sources shook the Times newsroom. Then, when Pulitzer-winner Bragg was fingered for not having observed certain details he’d eloquently described in a feature article, two top Times editors resigned. A spate of similar disclosures followed at other publications, further eroding readers’ trust.

Robinson’s take on the Times imbroglio: “You can’t go anywhere in this business with the reputation of being slipshod, intentional or not.” The ease of Internet searches, he says, makes it “far more true than it used to be that if you fake it, you’ll get caught. Drive-by storytelling is going to get you in trouble.

“No one’s ever accused me of being a great writer,” Robinson says. “But the best stories are those that are the most completely reported. The strength of the clergy series was in the facts, not the writing. There was no time for fancy writing.”

A product of twelve years of Catholic schools, Robinson says he braced for trouble over the series, which the Globe began running in January 2002. After all, ten years earlier, when the Globe reported on a single pedophile priest, Boston archdiocese head Cardinal Bernard Law called down God’s wrath upon the paper. In 1997, Robinson’s story about the drinking problems of former Boston mayor and Vatican ambassador Ray Flynn drew more than 200 phone calls accusing the Globe of, among other things, Catholic bashing.

This time, Robinson got a surprise. The mass of details and documents the Spotlight Team assembled resulted in widespread condemnation—but of the church’s activities, not the reporters’ efforts. Since the series ran, in the Boston archdiocese alone more than 150 priests have admitted to or been credibly accused of abuse, and in September the archdiocese agreed to pay a tentative $85 million settlement to more than 550 molestation victims.

Uncovering the full story of crimes and cover-ups hinged on the Globe lawyers’ successful challenge of a confidentiality agreement between the archdiocese and some of the victims. The ruling opened up 10,000 pages of documents, which the paper supplemented by interviewing scores of alleged victims.

Dan Kennedy, LA’79, the prizewinning Boston Phoenix media critic, praises the Globe for its efforts inside and outside the courts. The paper brought “unprecedented resources,” he says, and produced landmark change “by pounding away at the story day after day with new material, not rehashes. There’s nothing like the power a huge metropolitan publication brings to bear.” Kennedy says the series “was so overwhelming in breadth” that critics couldn’t fault it.

That breadth developed source by source, document by document. “Most of the people who read the newspaper think [reporters] know a lot,” Robinson noted in March at a panel discussion after the Spotlight Team won a $25,000 investigative reporting prize from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. “The big secret is we don’t know much at all.” Yet he’s found, he said, “that there are an enormous number of people of good will who know things that are wrong [and] are willing to talk about it, and all we have to do is find a way to ask.”

Ask the afflicted, not the comfortable, that is. Robinson has written that the clergy abuse series should remind journalists that the press is the only recourse for some victims, that those who cover powerful institutions must never lose their skepticism.

Beat the press

Even as he pounded out his first student assignments on a manual typewriter in the dingy United Realty Building (now Lake Hall), Robinson followed certain credos. First, he says, “whenever somebody says something, check it out.”

Second, “work harder than the next guy. The next guy, or woman, may be smarter—in my case, he probably is,” Robinson says. “So you start earlier, and get more information.” (On the White House beat, “earlier” meant 6 a.m. calls to senior presidential staffers, catching them before their secretaries had arrived to screen messages. During the Catholic Church investigations, “early” and “late” merged into near round-the-clock deadlines.)

The soft-spoken fifty-eight-year-old has filed from thirty countries, writing front-page scoops on everything from a governor’s lobster consumption to stolen art. Robinson’s earned many reporting honors and much recognition, including a Stanford University Fellowship.

Yet his road to journalism wasn’t without its twists and turns. He arrived on Huntington Avenue in 1963 as an English/journalism major, took a year off, returned in fall 1965, and completed a six-month co-op at the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune. He then enlisted in the Army’s three-year Officer Candidate School, opting to go on to a fourth year of service as an intelligence captain with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam.

Robinson reenrolled at the university in fall 1972 and jumped into his first co-op at the Globe. “For me and others at Northeastern,” he recalls, “the practical experience was enormously beneficial. I wouldn’t hire anyone without experience.”

Jack Driscoll gave him his first investigative reporting assignment—probing police involvement in gambling. Driscoll remembers Robinson as “pretty fearless, not at all afraid to ask the tough questions, unlike some young reporters who are in awe of public officials. He was always willing to take on tough cases.”

They came quickly. After joining the paper full-time the week he graduated, at the height of the school desegregation battles Robinson roamed South Boston and Charlestown—prime Globe-hating territory—with notebook in pocket, calling in stories from pay phones. He joked he faced more danger on Boston’s streets than in Vietnam.

He soon encountered another fight—at his own newspaper. After a vociferous desegregation foe claimed Robinson had misquoted her by substituting “color” for “power,” the Globe reader representative incorrectly “corrected” the story. Though a tape analysis showed Robinson had, in fact, gotten his wording right, it took the Columbia Journalism Review, not the Globe, to set the record straight.

A decade later, Robinson got considerably more in-house support when former gubernatorial candidate John Lakian sued him and the Globe for $50 million. At issue: a 2,200-word article by Robinson, reporting that Lakian had inflated his academic and Vietnam service records.

During the month-long libel trial, Robinson was grilled on the witness stand about such minutiae as the difference between “says” and “asserts,” and admitted to some mixed-up verb tenses and sloppy transcription of taped interviews.

Ultimately, the jury found three paragraphs of the article false and defamatory but concluded the story’s main thrust was accurate. Globe lawyers and editors deemed the jury’s refusal to award Lakian any damages a victory.

“A jury would find you libelous for saying the sun rose in the east,” Dan Kennedy says. “I don’t take that too seriously. Robby has a really remarkable record as an investigative reporter.”

“Lakian was a difficult time in his life,” Driscoll says, “but his reporting stood the test.”

Robinson went on to dissect the claims of other prominent figures. In 2000, for instance, after carefully piecing together 160 pages of bits of information, he discovered a yearlong gap in the Vietnam-era Air National Guard service of presidential candidate George W. Bush. The next year, he debunked Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph Ellis’s claims of Vietnam service.

“I know where to go to get records,” Robinson deadpans.

Ready for every test

A longtime Northeastern loyalist, Robinson taught introductory news writing courses at the university shortly after he graduated, and in 1980 helped with the selection of a new Journalism department chair.

He’s still a willing classroom guest, apologetic when this spring’s Pulitzer awards luncheon prevented him from speaking at the School of Journalism’s graduation ceremonies.

Robinson likes that the Northeastern journalism program isn’t a “trade” school, that it requires students to take a majority of courses outside the major. “People with liberal arts degrees are far more curious about the world around them, and these kinds of people make good reporters,” he says. “Without a sense of curiosity, you won’t get good information in your notebook.”

Though he wishes he’d studied more economics and art history at Northeastern, Robinson says, “doing good journalism is a lifetime education outside the classroom, not unlike a rigorous course in which you have to learn, produce, and get graded.”

Matthew Carroll

Matt Carroll says Robinson deserves a solid A: “He’s the best journalist I’ve ever known, from writing to editing. He has an incredible work ethic, an incredible memory and drive, and a real ability to see to the heart of
the story.”

Robinson returns the praise, noting Carroll’s painstaking compilation during the clergy abuse investigation of vital spreadsheet records, which tracked the shuffle of Boston archdiocese priests from parish to parish amid a variety of official notations: “sick leave,” “awaiting assignment,” “clergy personnel office,” “unassigned.”

Carroll created other databases, too, listing the names of alleged victims who had filed lawsuits and lawyers who had handled sexual abuse complaints, giving reporters easy access to sources. The meticulous work unearthed the identities of more than a hundred problem priests, including most of the thirty whose cases the church had already secretly settled.

The computer technology that aided this sleuthing was still a novelty in 1987, when Carroll, now forty-nine, joined the Globe as a business copy editor. He’d already covered fires, car accidents, and city council sessions for the Dedham (Mass.) Transcript and Pawtuxet (R.I.) Daily Times, and held down editing posts at the Middlesex News and Boston Herald.

Slim and intense, sipping coffee in the Globe cafeteria, clad in what appears to be the Spotlight uniform—khakis and a checked shirt—Carroll says he enrolled at Northeastern because his dad, a Husky grad himself, had recommended co-op. “I wasn’t an apt student,” he says, “but I liked the work-classroom split.”

Carroll left Northeastern after his junior year to start a twice-weekly local paper for West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Roslindale, then returned to Huntington Avenue to graduate with a cadre of successful LA’79 journalists: Dan Kennedy, Boston Herald managing editor Andrew Gully, Globe business reporter Steven Syre, and Baseball Weekly writer Seth Livingstone. (Carroll’s wife, Elaine Cushman, AS’81, was on the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune staff that won a 1988 Pulitzer for its exposé of the Massachusetts prison-furlough system. She’s now a Globe freelancer.)

At the Globe, Carroll was one of the first to spot technology’s potential for revolutionizing news gathering. After “playing around” with one of two newsroom computers, he interned for three months in the paper’s information technology department, to create useful databases for reporters.

He joined the Spotlight Team six years ago, after doing data digging for a series on municipal workers’ abuse of sick time. He left the team this summer to join the Globe’s South Weekly edition as a reporter/database manager, taking away both a Pulitzer and the “incredibly rewarding” knowledge that the clergy abuse series has done lasting good.

“The nicest part is thinking you’re helping people cope,” Carroll says, “after so many stories that just disappear into the ether.”

“Jack’s baby”

During his days on Morrissey Boulevard—where he worked as daily and Sunday Globe managing editor, executive editor, and editor in chief—Jack Driscoll made sure determined young reporters didn’t just disappear. “He was a great mentor for me and lots of other kids who scrapped their way through Northeastern and other local schools,” Robinson says. “He’s an approachable, smart editor.”

When Driscoll was executive editor, the Spotlight Team was “Jack’s baby,” Robinson says. “He had terrific sources, liked to get out of the office, and knew more than the street reporters about what was going on.”

Now a cherubic, perpetually smiling sixty-nine-year-old who tracks innovative technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, Driscoll joined the Globe as a sixteen-year-old Melrose correspondent. The age seems significant. “I always ask job seekers when they decided to become a journalist,” Driscoll says. “Ninety percent say ‘by age sixteen.’”

At the Globe, Driscoll practiced a collegial leadership that contrasts with the “top-down” style widely cited as a factor in the Times editors’ slowness to unmask Blair or rein in Bragg.

Charm didn’t mask journalistic steel, however. As the Spotlight Team investigated everything from lax elevator inspections to moonlighting public officials, Driscoll made a point of warning colleagues about the dangers of secret, and therefore potentially nonexistent, informants. He demanded editors know the identity of all anonymous sources, and in some cases talk with them, before their comments got into print.

This procedure, of course, would have quickly exposed Blair and others whose misdeeds have marred journalism’s image. Today, the Globe’s official post-Blair policy reads like an echo of Driscoll’s caution: “Simply saying ‘a source said’ is permitted only under the most unusual circumstances, and a top editor must sign off on it.”

Driscoll burnished his national reputation in 1976 when, after an Arizona reporter was murdered by the mob, he helped lead a multipaper team that sought to expose deep-rooted sources of crime and corruption. The project was spearheaded by Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., a nonprofit organization begun in 1975 to improve the integrity and practices of investigative journalism; both Robinson and Kennedy spoke at its national conference earlier this year.

But if in-depth reporting brings prestige, it also means expense for publishers. Driscoll and Robinson praise the Globe’s owners—now the New York Times Company, which also publishes the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and sixteen other newspapers—for letting the Spotlight Team tackle long-term projects, and not worrying about the advertisers who might be rankled by the results.

Such a commitment is increasingly rare. Media outlets are often just a small part of a huge package of businesses more focused on selling cigarettes, defense systems, or Disney World than on upholding the press’s traditional public-service responsibilities.

To the heads of these megaconglomerates, cutting reporting staffs, squeezing more stories from the reporters who remain, and reducing production costs make perfect economic, if flawed journalistic, sense. Consider the extra tons of newsprint the Globe used to reprint dozens of church documents in their entirety—how many owners would have approved even this expense?

And inside the maw of a media giant, the news-entertainment boundary often disappears. CBS News, for instance, in a pitch for exclusive access, offered former U.S. prisoner of war Private Jessica Lynch a documentary/entertainment/book package assembled by its Viacom empire. Though the details of Lynch’s capture and rescue in Iraq remain
mysterious and controversial, under these “synergistic” circumstances how intensely would she have been questioned about what really happened?

Despite the dispiriting trends, Driscoll urges new journalism grads to stick to tried-and-true newsroom principles, to ask the inconvenient questions. The best journalists, he says, are motivated “like public servants, like the calling to the ministry. The survival of the media as a positive force in a democratic society depends on them.”

He adds another prerequisite: “Passion. If you don’t have fire in the belly, it’s all over right there.”

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism.