Finally, on December 27, in what appeared to be a last-minute addition to the Globe's Pulitzer package, Spotlight reporter Sacha Pfeiffer echoed some of the observations that had been published months earlier in other newspapers such as the Boston Herald.  In Women face stigma of clergy sexual abuse, Pfeiffer noted that many female victims are reluctant to speak out because they are apt to be accused of provoking the crimes committed against them and afraid to see their sexual histories displayed in court or in the press.  Pfeiffer did not explain why the Spotlight Team had ignored the many female survivors from Massachusetts who had come forward such as Christine Hickey, Carol Xenos, Gloria Delblane, Susan Renehan, Joyce Nebush, Ann Hagan Webb, Debbie Doucet, Nicole Cormier, Heather Mackey, Cindy Desrosiers, and Susan Gallagher. However, she did back away from what Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund described as one of the guiding principles of Spotlight reporting throughout 2002, which was that the "overwhelming majority of provable victims are men."

Now, once again, the presentation of new cases has obliged the Spotlight Team to peddle away from previous positions.  Thus, in Church dismissed accusations by females, Thomas Farragher and Matt Carroll explicitly acknowledged what survivors have been telling them all along, which is that "women who complained that they had been assaulted as girls often received dismissive treatment" from Church officials.  Moreover, at long last, the Spotlight Team put on record what victims' advocates have been repeating for months: "'Victims, male and female, were discounted, but it was even more pronounced with respect to women,' said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests."

Rather than conceding any missteps in their previous reporting, Farragher and Carroll excused the gulf between this more accurate view of female victims and their earlier approach by making it clear that they have never been inclined to look beyond the most obvious facts. "Of the clergy abuse cases referred to prosecutors in Eastern Massachusetts," they pointed out, "more than 90% involve male victims.  And the most prominent Boston lawyers for alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse have said that about 95% of their clients are male."  It is apparently too much to expect Farragher and Carroll to recognize that victims who were brushed aside by Church officials would be less likely to contact lawyers and, consequently, less likely to have their cases referred to authorities.  Likewise, these reporters seem unable to understand that the Globe itself has played a decisive role in discouraging women from speaking out.  As Janet Kornblum observed in USA Today last June, "There tends to be a self-perpetuating loop that may be inadvertently encouraging more male than female victims to report their abuse. When victims see stories like their own in the media, they are more likely to come forward themselves."

Of course, the most honest and effective way for the Spotlight Team to clear up the confusion created by the males-only standpoint it adopted last year would be for the Globe to openly admit that its reporters misjudged the ratio of male to female victims.  After all, since the Globe has already been forced to grant, at least indirectly, that Chinlund's statement on the gender of credible victims was wrong, isn't it reasonable to expect the Globe to acknowledge that it misreported this aspect of the crisis in the Church? 

To most people, missing one third to one half of the victims of priests who preyed on children seems like a serious mistake, serious enough surely for Chinlund to call attention to it in one of her columns.  However, even after survivors groups had repeatedly complained about the Spotlight Team's failure to report on women, Chinlund made no mention of this omission in her year-end tribute to the glories of the Globe.  "It's worth noting," Chinlund wrote last month, "that very few of the 901 corrections, clarifications, omissions, and editor's notes of 2002 ...appeared because of errors in the 800 stories on abuse in the Catholic Church."  Since only one of those 800 stories profiled women who had been victimized as children, and since the Globe itself acknowledged that one third or more of minor victims are female, the average reader, not to mention the typical Pulitzer juror, might be inclined to judge the Globe's record somewhat more harshly.

On the other hand, since evidence seems increasingly irrelevant in this context, perhaps leaving out a third or more of the story is not a major problem, even in a newspaper series that is supposed to exemplify investigative excellence.  Whatever conclusions media watchers may draw, the Globe has already chosen itself as this year's Pulitzer winner by carefully timing the release of the Spotlight Series, placing the right puff pieces in the right magazine, pushing the Spotlight Team's mid-story book, Betrayal, and defining itself as the newspaper of record on the scandal by sheer volume of column inches.  Meanwhile, if survivors or advocates or activists speak out about serious inaccuracies, the Globe can retaliate by maligning vulnerable victims, refusing to report on important developments, or otherwise manipulating public perceptions of the crisis in the Church.  The outcome of the Globe's campaign for the Pulitzer may thus be to complete a transaction that has already started, which is the transfer of the same kind of irrational deference that used to be paid to bishops and cardinals to the most self-promoting members of the press. 

One could ask, "Nellie Bly, where are you?," but that would be hopelessly outdated.  Apparently, in our time, even reports on the rape of children must conform to the rule of spin.

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