—— Rousseau is
at the mouth of the Hudson River in the United States, on the east coast of New York. The Statue of Liberty is dressed in ancient Greek-style clothing. She wears a crown of swordsmanship that symbolizes the seven continents of the world, and her feet are broken heavy handcuffs and anklets. This sword light, the sword refers to freedom, and this shackles imprison the mind.
Pulitzer once said: “If the country is a sailing ship, the journalist is the watcher at the bow.”
At the end of the twentieth century, the United States was a turbulent sea. Under the cloud of religion, the law that was originally the most powerful is subject to the fourth power, religion. Religion has supreme rights and inviolable authority. The priest, the node connecting believers and God, has become the greatest gainer. Once a person tastes the sweetness of desire, he is more likely to be greedy, let alone a priest who has been abstinent for many years. Deformed desires all landed on the immature children. Because the priest is involved, most people choose to keep silent, fearful, or embarrassed. But there is a kind of people who are uncrowned kings on the bow of society, and they cannot choose to be silent. They are journalists.
At that time, the paper media was in the golden age of development. Journalists were independent of power. They were not the mouthpieces of religious parties, but independent brains. They did not submit to any power other than the law. They shouldered moral responsibility.
The film is adapted from a piece in the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. It tells the story of a focus group of Boston's "Global Times" digging into and reporting multiple incidents of Catholic fathers sexually assaulting young children. The first dozens of sporadic incidents of sexual assault were simply not enough to fight the church, and reports and complaints on individual cases could not change the status quo. The church’s senior officials abandoned their pawns and secured their cars, and only slightly punished the priests involved. This is also the law. The reason why the government can suppress. On the other hand, the focus group also faces the dilemma of reporting. If there are not a large number of reports of similar vicious incidents, it will be suppressed by the colluding government and church as in previous reports. If the report is delayed, the peers will seize the opportunity and lose the best time to report. Moreover, for the vast majority of investigative reports, they ultimately point to a problem-the system. And religion is one of such systems. The pressure faced by the focus group can be imagined. But they did not change their expressions and started a long struggle with the entangled fourth power. I was immersed in the old newspapers, court archives, interpersonal relations, and minutiae like the sea, interviewed hundreds of suffering victims, guided them to tell their unspeakable past, and finally succeeded in fighting the systemic problems and fulfilling their mission.
The narration of the film is very plain, there is no personal heroic display, only the sincere unity of the focus group. The clues of the story are very concise, even seem a little dull, there is no ups and downs plot, no drama of love, no surprises beyond the unexpected, no dramatic treatment, the whole film even has only one intense emotional expression. Most of the space is left for the facts that gradually surfaced and the dull but true truth-seeking process, but it is also the brilliance of the film, the cruel reality, the complicated process, which highlights the firmness and toughness of the focus group. , The mission of the reporter remains the same.
Today, we are in an era of rapid development of new media. The original justice of the media is gradually dimming. While news is entertaining, society is becoming more impetuous. In many cases, news gimmicks overshadow the value of news itself. At this time, the birth of a film proudly proclaiming the power of independent media is undoubtedly a valuable lesson for young journalists. "Independent media" refers to media whose ownership and finance are independent of the government and political parties. The Western view of news believes that only independent media can be free from government and party control, maintain "political neutrality," and thus become "public instruments of society." Only independent media is the best weapon to check and balance power, and only independent and mature journalists can really strike out and hit the key. Focus groups are such an existence. They have the courage to reject the church, the ability to dig deep into the facts, and the stamina to follow up and investigate, and only then have the power to enjoy the pleasure of exposing sins.
Social injustice has never disappeared, like a thick gray fog. "Sometimes we love to forget that we have been wandering in the dark for a long time, but blamed each other after daybreak." How to get rid of the dense fog and how to make the light brighter is the eternal responsibility of the media. Behind the news is often the confession of an era. "Focus" talks about the golden age of paper media. A stack of seemingly backward prints can stir up waves in our hearts more than a flash of news on the screen.
The film pays tribute to the once glorious era of paper media, and it pays tribute to the media people of that era. They stay away from the hustle and bustle, away from the trend, and consistently do his job-lookout.
(As a student of radio and television journalism in China, after watching the video, his heart was ups and downs, and he wanted to devote his life to journalism, but he was as helpless as suffering from a cold poison. After all, the Chinese news media is still the mouthpiece of a political party, not the people The mouthpiece is not an independent brain)
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