If you want to read a great review of the movie Spotlight, then head straight to this link.

That's where you'll find Adrian Mack's insightful and nuanced evaluation of Tom McCarthy's film about a Boston Globe investigation into the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilic priests.

Here's my favourite line in Mack's review: "Spotlight harks back to paranoid ’70s thrillers in its attempt to tell the story, with wintry visuals straight out of Alan J. (All the President’s Men) Pakula’s playbook and the kind of spare and beautifully loaded dialogue—courtesy of Josh Singer and director Tom McCarthy—that Robert Towne used to specialize in."

I'm better suited to thinking about journalism than writing film reviews. 

Here, the movie left me with a big unanswered question: to what extent were the New York Times owners involved in the decision to take down the Catholic Church in Boston in 2002?

Richard H. Gilman was publisher of the Boston Globe from 1999 to 2006. He only appears momentarily on-screen in Spotlight.

This occurs when the editor-in-chief, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber), informs Gilman that he's hiring a lawyer to file a motion in court. This was being done to unseal court documents that the Catholic Church wanted kept under wraps.

The actor playing Gilman (Michael Countryman) looks like a dunce, blithely accepting Baron's dictum before the editor marches out the door.

In real life, Gilman is no fool.

A former New York Times senior vice president of operations, he was sent to run the Boston Globe after the parent company paid $1.1 billion for the newspaper.

Clearly, the New York Times Company wanted to recoup its billion-dollar investment in the Boston daily.

After Gilman became the Boston Globe publisher, he hired Baron from the Miami Herald as editor-in-chief. Baron had worked there for a year after leaving the New York Times.

So Gilman and Baron each had a history at the New York Times. It's controlled by descendants of the founder, Adolph Ochs (primarily the Sulzberger family).

To suggest, as Spotlight implies, that the publisher was a bit player in what happened is just not credible.

Hollywood loves to produce films showing crusading newspaper journalists revealing wrongdoing by the rich and powerful. But it's hard to believe that the Boston Globe would have gone to the wall against the Catholic Church in Boston without the strong backing of the parent company.

I was curious about any discussions that took place between Baron and Gilman and between Gilman and the Sulzberger family before the story was published. None of that was covered.

I even wondered if any of the key decision makers had themselves been sexually abused as children—and if this heightened their motivation to tackle this issue.

My guess is that in the executives' corner offices, there would have been a lot of talk about the humdrum stuff—such as the company's stock price, legal ramifications, potential boycotts, and future advertising revenues.

That isn't nearly as compelling as watching a bunch of journalists pounding the pavement looking for victims of sexual abuse.

So in the end, Gilman gets portrayed as a hapless bystander in Spotlight.

The reality is that investigative journalism requires more than courageous journalists. It also requires courageous publishers.

One day, I hope that Hollywood takes this into account to give other publishers more courage to engage in this sometimes risky and often expensive endeavour. 

The postscript to Spotlight is that the editor, Baron, later went to work for the Washington Post.

In 2013, the New York Times Company eventually gave up on the Boston Globe. It was sold to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry for $70 million.

The market value of the newspaper had fallen by more than $1 billion since it was bought in 1993.

It was a lousy return on the Sulzbergers' investment.