protest letter to Pulitzer Board

1. Since the Globe's coverage of the scandal has been so voluminous and much of it is readily available in electronic archives, there is considerable danger that readers will credit the misleading reports that the paper has failed to retract.

2. Given the Globe's high profile, its misrepresentation of the gender ratio among the victims of Catholic priests could, and indeed has, in our opinion, discouraged other female victims from coming forward, and it has also supported the Church’s strategy of blaming the crisis on homosexual priests.

3. The Globe's distorted coverage and its editorial rush to judgment in the Edwards case is bound to have profound reverberations, both because Monsignor Foster is so prominent and powerful, and because the Globe took the unusual step of highlighting its inaccurate conclusions in an improper lead editorial and in a feature box on its web site. Without explicit correction, this coverage will continue to make other victims dread the mistreatment that Edwards suffered and remain reluctant to speak out. And since Foster’s reinstatement in November was so closely tied to Globe reports, victims have every reason to fear his command over their cases, as well as his influence over the press. We are also concerned that the coverage will embolden canon lawyers and Church officials, who are already stepping up their tactic of stonewalling secular authorities and intimidating victims of clergy abuse.

Outline of Evidence

To maximize the clarity of the evidence that we have gathered, we have divided it into two parts. First, to document the Spotlight Team’s failure to report on female victims, we have created a timeline that details gender-related reporting on the crisis and shows when the stories of women who had contacted the Globe appeared elsewhere in the press. Also, to illustrate how rejecting women’s stories hobbled the Spotlight Team’s ability to report on other aspects of the scandal, the timeline chronicles the contrast between Globe coverage of fiercely debated questions such as the role of homosexuality in the crisis and the way other news organizations addressed these concerns.

Next, to document the Globe’s irresponsible and ongoing mistreatment of Paul Edwards, we have included annotated versions of four of the eighteen articles that the Globe published on the Cummings/Foster case. At the end of each of these sections, we have appended emails to and from reporters and editors, published and unpublished letters to the editor, survivors’ accounts of their encounters with Globe reporters, various statements made by victims and supporters, internal Church documents, and articles published in the Globe and in other newspapers.

Summary of Section One: Reporting on Female Survivors

As you review the evidence that we have gathered, please keep a few considerations in mind. The emotional pain at the heart of this scandal should not be minimized. Having been threatened into silence as children and, as adults, intimidated or bribed by Church officials, abandoned by disbelieving family members, and shunned by mainstream Catholics, most survivors intended to keep what happened to them secret for the rest of their lives. Victims began to speak out publicly during the past year because it seemed that the media was finally ready to recognize the crimes committed against them as grave offenses, and they expected journalists to treat them with some civility, rather than, as the Church had done, exploiting their vulnerability and attacking their credibility.

However, throughout 2002, the Spotlight Team reacted to female survivors much as the Church had responded for years. No matter how much evidence these women presented, no matter how dangerous their predators had been, no matter how much light their stories might have shed on the scandal in general, their accounts were uniformly and, we should add, rudely rejected, even when this rejection made it more difficult for the Spotlight Team to report accurately on related developments. We have no idea how Spotlight reporters and editors account for these omissions, but the evidence that we have collected shows that women’s stories that received major attention in other publications were deliberately excluded from the Globe.

Moreover, as illustrated by the anti-gay articles and editorials included in our chronology, reporters everywhere knew that refusing to acknowledge female victims fueled the Vatican’s efforts to blame the crisis on homosexual priests. While gay rights groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) were doing their best to call attention to the significant number of girls among victims, and, thereby, dispel the misperception of child sexual abuse as a “homosexual problem,” the Globe continued to report that the vast majority of predatory priests target adolescent boys. Along these lines, Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund asserted in November that the Spotlight Team’s coverage of adults who had been victimized as children was guided by the finding that the “overwhelming majority of provable victims are men.”

On December 27, 2002, when the Globe published its first and only profile of women who had been victimized as children—a story which, as Chinlund put it, had been on the Team’s “to-do list” for months—Spotlight reporter Sacha Pfeiffer finally acknowledged that the Globe’s assumptions did not square with expert opinion: “Many specialists on clergy sex abuse say they believe that girls represent a substantial portion— some say a third or more — of minors who are molested by priests.” The Spotlight Team could have included this statement in a much earlier piece, especially if it had elected to cover breaking news on cases involving female victims. In May, for example, when new lawsuits were filed against Robert E. Kelley, a former priest from Worcester, Massachusetts, Globe columnists commented on the case, and news outlets from around the nation published multiple stories. However, the Spotlight Team let pass this opportunity to report on female survivors even though Kelley has admitted to raping somewhere between 50 and 100 girls.

In our view, the Spotlight Team’s last-minute piece on women seemed designed, not to correct the misperceptions that the Globe had promoted for the previous eleven months, but to beef up the paper’s Pulitzer package before the end of the year. Unfortunately for the Globe, it is impossible to overlook the Spotlight Team’s under-reporting on female victims or its indifference to anti-gay backlash, or its general lack of insight into the role of gender in the scandal in the Church. Likewise, it is difficult to credit the excuses offered by Christine Chinlund, who explained the Spotlight Team’s failure to write about female victims by observing, “a four-person team can do only so much.” “Doing only so much” is, as far as we can see, not in keeping with the Pulitzer Board's conception of “meritorious public service,” just as missing at least one-third of the story falls far below any rational standard of investigative excellence.

Section Two: The Globe’s Assault of Paul R. Edwards

We do not underestimate the harm inflicted by the Spotlight Team’s omission of stories on women, but this pattern of mistreatment pales beside the Globe’s concerted attacks on alleged victim Paul R. Edwards. In the course of over a dozen major articles on the Edwards/Foster/Cummings case, the Spotlight Team drew on false information provided by Foster’s supporters to portray Edwards as a pathological liar who had maligned the public image of two blameless priests. Most of the details the Globe repeatedly reported on Edwards –that he had “lied” to his friends when he was seven years old, that he had pretended to be deaf in high school—were not merely untrue or impossible to verify, they were entirely irrelevant to the investigation of his charges against either Foster or Cummings. Moreover, when evidence uncovered by the Boston Herald and presented in a Church investigation showed that the Globe’s caricature of Edwards had no basis in fact, the Spotlight Team not only refused to make corrections, but deliberately misreported new information, continued to assault Edwards’ reputation, and hid its role in shutting down the Church investigation of Edwards’ accusations.

The Globe’s annihilation of Edwards’ character and credibility confirms one of the deepest fears of virtually all victims of sexual abuse, which is that those who speak out will be crushed by forces more powerful than they could ever hope to be. In fact, many survivors who witnessed the Spotlight Team’s ruthless campaign against Edwards believe that it is not safe for us to call attention to the Globe’s misconduct in this case.

While these anxieties are understandable, we simply cannot stand by and allow the Globe to undermine Paul Edwards or anyone else who comes forward with plausible allegations, especially when the Church withholds crucial information, as it did in its closing of the Foster/Cummings inquiry. As organized survivors and supporters, our central concern is to help those who have been abused and to protect future generations by creating a climate in which victims can speak the truth without fear of retaliation or further abuse. If the Spotlight Team’s devastating campaign against Edwards goes uncorrected and, as a result, his charges against Foster and Cummings are never fully investigated, we could not in good conscience advise any victim to take a public stand against any predatory priest.

Conclusion

Many newspapers have reported superbly on this crisis. In Boston, we have long known that the Herald and the Globe presented different versions of events as they unfolded, and the Herald has been consistently more reliable in the two areas we have discussed in this letter. In Boston and elsewhere, the coverage of this national and international scandal has been noticeably local, and this has impaired public understanding of larger aspects of the crisis such as the bishops' practice of moving abusive priests from place to place in order to conceal their crimes. While excellent investigative journalism has been done more locally by reporters with the Milwaukee Sentinel, Louisville Courier and the Toledo Blade, the regional slant of most reporting has also made it difficult to develop a complete statistical profile of the priests and bishops and their victims. Three newspapers have done notable work on this larger story: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News.

These sources can be used to correct some of the inaccuracies of the Globe’s reporting, but the more significant damage done by the Spotlight Team’s indifference towards female survivors, as well as its assault of Paul Edwards, will be harder to make right. Certainly, one way to restore survivors’ trust in the media is to refuse to reward Spotlight reporters for their inadequate, insensitive, and ill-informed coverage of crimes against female victims. Likewise, we can refuse to allow Church officials to use the press to insulate abusive priests from credible charges, even if they manage to engineer a multi-article blitzkrieg of irrelevant information, as they did in the Globe.

With these goals in mind, we ask the Pulitzer Board to reject the Boston Globe’s entry in this year’s Pulitzer competition. While the evidence that led us to this request is clear, we have had to weigh the Globe’s breach of professional standards against the benefits generated by the paper’s coverage of the crisis in the Church. Some of those involved in this struggle fear that speaking truth to power may backfire by encouraging those we criticize to respond by refusing to report important news, further maligning victims, or manipulating public perception of the realities of sexual abuse. However, as survivors, supporters, and advocates, we have reached this certain conclusion: a newspaper that misinformed the public, refused to make corrections, and cemented the silence of untold numbers of victims should not be celebrated for inciting so much misunderstanding of so many vicious crimes.

Signed:

Susan E. Gallagher, for:

CCS = Coalition of Catholics & Survivors VOTF = Voice of the Faithful

SNAP = Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests STTOP= Speak Truth to Power

(Affiliation indicates individual support, not endorsement by group)