If you want to know what has been lost as the great newspapers of America have withered and died and been replaced by cable news and Buzzfeed – I admit that I like Buzzfeed – you ought to go see Spotlight,  an exhilarating and thrilling movie about how a small group of reporters at the Boston Globe spent eight months working to expose the massive cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese of the sexual abuse of children by  hundreds of priests.

In modern journalism, 500 words is a long piece of reporting, and many stories are told only through short videos or endless arguments. The new reporters rarely have much space and never have anytime, they almost never go anywhere but to their computer screens.

This was driven  home to me during the New York Carriage Horse controversy, which raged on for years amid mounting accusations of cruelty and animal abuse. But no reporters from any news organization ever came to the stables to see what was really happening until actor Liam Neeson showed up. More than 200 reporters appeared magically to  see him, his appearance at the stables turned the tide.

The New York Times was a golf shot away from the stables. No reporter from the paper has walked over.

I am not into nostalgia. I don’t buy into the notion that the old days are always gooder than the new. And I should disclose that I was a journalist, I did work for the Boston Globe, among other papers,  and I saw again and again the role good reporters on an honest and powerful newspaper could play in bringing accountability to the powerful.

There is a memorable scene at the beginning of this somber but surprisingly thrilling film when Martin Baron, the newly arrived editor of the Globe sits down with Bernard Cardinal Law in his lush residence. Cardinal Law advises him that “the city flourishes when its great institutions work together.” Baron dissents, he softly argues that newspapers should stand alone. The theme of the film has been skillfully introduced.

Newspapers were far from flawless and perfect institutions, but the good ones reported in the most powerful way what happens when power runs amok in the absence of accountability. As newspapers have withered, shrunk, struggled and died in the face of the great digital onslaught, it is very hard to see or know or read what has not been reported, what has not been uncovered, what powerful forces have not been held accountable for what they have done. Public distrust of politicians and government has mushroomed. Since we no longer have any idea what those in power are really doing, we can so easily imagine the worst.

As a former investigative reporter, I was staggered to learn from the Globe how pervasive and epidemic child abuse had become in the Catholic Church, a horrific nightmare stepchild of the practice of celibacy. It was, as the reporters discovered in Boston, much more than a crime. It was a system, it was not possible for it to have occurred on such a scale without the knowledge and complicity of the entire Church hierarchy and its network of friends, lawyers and believers.

The movie drives that point home with great power and detail, and it may leave you numb with disbelief and sympathy for the victims. Sometimes, it is much worse than you ever imagined.

There is no bullshit in this movie, no explosions, car chases, death threats or great action drama.  It’s just a powerful story, told flawlessly. The film does a wonderful job of showing how reporters work, the phone calls, knocks on doors, poring through files and records. Make no mistake about it, the movie is about child abuse and the Catholic Church, but it is also very poignant eulogy for the journalism that shined so much light on the dark corners of power. That kind of journalism is dead.

The testimony of the young men and women molested by serial pedophiles wearing collars and hiding behind the myth and glory of the church is haunting. The reporters could hardly believe what they were seeing and hearing and discovering. First, they investigated one case, and were stunned to learn there may be 13 cases, and they could hardly believe it when they learned they might be 90 cases. There ended up being 249 child abuses in the Boston Archdiocese alone, there were more than 1,000 victims who came forward. Many, it is believed, have not.

Even though we know the ending, the film is a nail-biter, it brilliantly captures the methods and process of good journalism, the piecing together of many parts to tell the whole. Journalism, like the making of sausage, is not pretty and it is not romanticized here. Some of the reporters were lazy, some were blind to what was right under their noses

It was an oddly personal experience for me, seeing such an important part of my  life being portrayed as past history. I know many people who have never touched a real newspaper, let alone read one. But it really wasn’t that long ago that this kind of journalism thrived. The Globe ran it’s expose of the Church in 2002. Cardinal Law, who was proven to have know about the abuse, resigned and was re-assigned,  sent to one of the church’s most beautiful parishes in Rome.

Ever since journalism died, our civic life seems to have devolved in a cesspool of paranoia, argument and ignorance. We have no one to believe but the people who agree with us, and that is a poisonous brew for any democracy.

In the end, I gave up journalism for book writing. I Ioved every minute of my newspaper time, but even then, the creativity and drive of the best papers was being leeched by the corporations who ended up devouring our media and culture. I felt it was time to get out and turned to books, and I think I got out just in time.

I think that all of my life, I have been running and running to get ahead of the Corporate Tsunami that spreads greed and disconnection and smothers integrity and creativity everywhere it goes. Go see the movie to see what it looked like. I doubt there is a single corporation running a single media organization that would authorize or permit what the Boston Globe undertook in Spotlight (the name of the investigative unit at the Globe that reported the story).

I have no doubt that if this abuse were occurring today, it would continue unchecked for a very long time because there is no Spotlight team on any newspaper to take it on.

I wanted to cry during this movie, mostly, I think in sorrow for what the people we trust the most can do to us and our children. But also, selfishly, because I was mourning for the loss of something so precious and valuable to me, and to all us.  Journalism and democracy have always worked imperfectly together to keep one another in balance, and now we are dangerously out of whack.

I honestly have no idea who is holding the powerful accountable for the things they might do, or even say. No one is.