The News
Brendan McCarthy, the editor of the Boston Globe’s legendary “Spotlight” investigative team, is exactly the guy you’d expect to play Brendan McCarthy in the movie: He’s credentialed, occasionally abrasive, and his official headshot makes him look more like Michael Clayton than Michael Keaton. Back when he was a TV reporter in New Orleans, he played himself on the HBO show Treme. At the Globe, he led a team that delivered the 2021 Pulitzer for a series about dangerous drivers.
McCarthy, a 2004 graduate of Boston’s Emerson College, is a familiar newsroom character: A big personality, a star — and, recently, a bit of a management challenge. But what, exactly, does that mean in 2025? When complaints about his management style reached the human resources department late last year and earlier this year, it forced the Globe to consider questions — about culture, management, and the boundaries of acceptability — that have been at the center of the internal turmoil in American newsrooms in a decade.
At least two Globe journalists had complained in writing to the company’s head of HR, Rohini Murthy, about what they described as verbal harassment earlier in 2025, according to eight current and former Globe journalists. McCarthy, according to the complaints, separately berated two Globe journalists over perceived editorial differences, they said, cursing at his team and at staff working on Spotlight-related projects. Four other people told Semafor that they had also been told about the alleged incidents. One employee claimed McCarthy punished employees who complained about his management by reducing their roles in journalistic projects.
The source of McCarthy’s frustration was in the mundane but high-stakes flow of investigative journalism: He told colleagues he felt reporters and producers were not receptive to his feedback on important details of stories.
The Globe’s management, through its HR department, opened an investigation. In internal conversations following the complaints, McCarthy acknowledged being blunt, but systematically rejected any claim that he had crossed the lines of acceptable workplace conduct.
Earlier this spring, the Globe concluded its investigation. McCarthy, the organization found, had not broken the rules, and would not be disciplined in any way. The leadership of the paper, and others within Spotlight interviewed during the investigation, felt that McCarthy had behaved appropriately, and was in fact focused on guaranteeing the accuracy of sensitive, high-stakes projects.
The paper said in a statement that while its policy is not to discuss individual incidents, it had investigated the allegations against McCarthy and “determined no further action was warranted.” (The Globe, and McCarthy, didn’t respond to questions about specific alleged incidents.)
“Our award-winning Spotlight team undertakes important and impactful work that is a large part of our commitment to providing readers with trusted news and information,” a spokesperson for the paper said. “We recognize the dedication and leadership that Spotlight Editor Brendan McCarthy contributes to this effort, and his track record as a respected colleague in the newsroom and industry speaks for itself.”
In a statement to Semafor, Globe top editor Nancy Barnes said that she is “incredibly proud of the important and difficult work that Spotlight is tackling under Brendan’s leadership. I am fortunate to have him on my team.”
In this article:
Know More
It’s impossible to understand the Globe’s decision without a glance through the dizzying shifts in newsrooms over the last decade. The social media movements of the 2010s, beginning with #MeToo, were driven in large part by journalism.
After the first wave of grotesque journalistic revelations about sex and power — Weinstein, Epstein, Cosby — a new genre of investigative journalism began to expose high-profile bosses who verbally crossed the line, humiliated their employees, or behaved unprofessionally at work. (The Australian journalist Lachlan Cartwright referred to this as the “Mean Too Movement.“) Companies responded by jettisoning a few mean executives, changing their internal communications strategies, and retraining bosses to be nicer.
This played out within newsrooms through painful public reckonings both over illegal conduct, like sexual harassment, and the gray areas of workplace power dynamics. Newsrooms — like many other companies, amid a tight labor market and booming economy — responded with intense sympathy for junior employees who felt mistreated by managers and bullied by untouchable stars.
But the post-COVID cultural shift to the right — defined by President Donald Trump’s second victory, the emergence of the “manosphere,” Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and a broad reaction against the progressive social movements — seemed to sap popular interest (or at least the shock value) in these stories about bad bosses, particularly in the newsrooms that have mostly stopped covering them. The victory of the objectively ruder candidate, partially aided by the modern-day shock jocks and comedians, seemed to send a message to the news media, in its journalism and internal culture alike: A lot of people aren’t as offended as you think.
Max’s view
I’ve spoken to more than a dozen people in the Globe newsroom and some who have left in the last year, partially because nearly every person I spoke with insisted that I speak with multiple other people who would corroborate their side of the story. (One person gave me a list of 28.) The camps were more or less divided between people who think McCarthy crossed a line with staff in several instances, and others who see him as a top-tier editor with a passion for journalistic results and less patience for staff who fall short. (There’s some overlap in these categories.)
The Globe’s decision to stand by McCarthy is the latest in a series of indications that newsroom culture is shifting radically to match this backlash moment. Last year, the new executive editor of The New York Times, Joseph Kahn, told Semafor that his newsroom would not be a “safe space” and that reporters who didn’t want to cover people they found distasteful “should work somewhere else.” Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stood by the paper’s CEO, despite outcry and leaks from staff over a decades-old ongoing investigation in the UK.
In a particularly colorful recent reflection of this pattern, the New York Times business editor recently survived a flap in which she told a reporter that she would kill him, his editor, and herself (presumably in that order) if his story came in over 2,000 words. The reporter complained to HR, to no avail.
The Globe lacks the Times’ global stature, but it remains one of America’s great regional papers, and one of its most commercially successful, under the stewardship of owner and publisher John Henry. And the Spotlight swagger — an appetite for conflict that brought it into a legendary battle with the Catholic Church — is at the core of an unusually successful and growing brand.
It’s hard not to see in the decision to stand by McCarthy a conclusion that journalism’s rough, confrontational edges may simply require big, difficult personalities, in a cultural moment dominated by them.
One staffer noted to me that if the McCarthy incident had “happened at Harvard, we’d be investigating it — but when it happens at the Globe, no one here cares.” But the shift may be broader, as newsrooms both describe a cultural shift and, at least in some cases, embody it.
Room for Disagreement
The pendulum hasn’t swung back everywhere. The Columbia Journalism Review abruptly ousted its editor over “insults, threats to ruin their reputations, and an atmosphere of fear and hostility,” the Times reported. The editor responded by calling the incidents “normal workplace interactions.”
Notable
- Anna Wintour, famous as much for Meryl Streep’s brutal portrayal in The Devil Wears Prada as for her years helming Vogue, laughed off the movie in an effusive farewell interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick last week: “I thought it was a fair shot.”