Importance Of Child Molestation In Roman Catholic Conrad's 'Spotlight'

Firstly, the media’s ability to shape and influence perceptions of the public can be observed in “Spotlight”. In the midst of investigations, Marty Baron, editor of The Boston Globe, demanded that the Spotlight team changed the angle of the child molestation issue story by writing about how the church dealt with the crimes of the Roman Catholic Priests by helping them escape the law, instead of just writing about the priests who were found guilty of child molestation.

In this scene, Baron uses thematic framing as a form of agenda setting to interpret the importance of child molestation by Roman Catholic Priests in Boston. Agenda setting is defined as the media’s ability to choose and emphasise certain topics, thus perceiving these topics

According to the spiral of silence theory, people are less vocalised when believed to be part of the minority and are more vocalised when believed to be part of the majority (Mcquail 519). In “Spotlight”, Joe Crowley and Patrick McSorley, both victims of child molestation by Roman Catholic Priests, were initially reluctant to give their statements to the Spotlight journalists as the issue of pedophile priests were still being kept under wraps by churches and the press, and was not yet widely known to many. This is an example of the spiral of silence theory, in which the victims were unwilling to express their views openly due to the fear of isolation (Mcquail

Therefore, this shows that the effect in which The Boston Globe had on the victims of child molestation was the reversal of their initial spiral of silence.

Similarly, the spiral of silence theory is evident in real-life situations. An example would be the Shuquan Secondary School bullying incident in 2015, where two students were seen to be bullied in a video that went viral on Facebook. In the video, apart from the victims who remained quiet with their heads low while they were slapped on the heads, other classmates surrounding them were quiet and did not stand up for the bullying as well. However, after the video caught the attention of both online netizens and the news media, the two victims soon filed for a police