Boston Globe Editor Martin Baron made two public appearances yesterday at the University of Massachusetts, outlining the Globe’s coverage of several major events and telling his audience, “the mission of a newspaper is to get at the truth.”

Baron spent considerable time explaining the thought process behind uncovering the scandal in the archdiocese of Boston and the Catholic Church. “We knew that those stories would put us in a situation of competition with the Catholic Church,” Baron said.

He said that “a rich vein of material” could be found showing that the scandal was important to public policy. “The point is we’ve never it’s a majority of priests,” Baron said. “What we said is that there were priests, and that when there were priests, the church did very little to investigate and react to it.”

Baron said that a column run by Eileen McNamara in July 2001 caught his attention. The column said that documents exposing sexual abuses in the Catholic Church “would never see the light of day,” because of a court order that kept them from becoming public information.

“Those stories got my attention,” Baron said. “To me sex abuses like that on a national scale deserved national attention.”

Baron said that he could not see why the media was settling for less than whole story because of a lack of access to the court documents. Within a day he was talking to Globe lawyers about drafting documents to challenge the court order. “It had never really come up before,” he said.

“The Church argued [that] we had no right to ask for the document. It was a public policy issue,” Baron said. “Whether the Church properly supervised priests…whether they had been negligent, or worse, in not removing priests.”

He said that a longtime religion writer told him that the Globe ran 250 stories on the Catholic Church in the first hundred days of their coverage. The first article drawing on the court documents ran Jan. 7, 2002.

“We have no issues with exonerating priests who are falsely accused,” Baron said of priests who have been named in false lawsuits. “We’ve done both.”

Baron acknowledged comparisons between Watergate and the Church scandal. “It’s an interesting comparison,” he said.

He said that there are certain fundamental differences between the two cases, though. He cited the methodology in which the stories were gathered as a difference. “Watergate had a lot of anonymous sources,” Baron said. “They’re different in character,” he said.

Baron said that the stories are comparable in the “profound impact” that they have had on institutions.

The Globe editor also outlined the coverage in Boston of 9/11. “While it happened in New York, it was also very much our story,” Baron said.

Baron said that he had been on the job for about six weeks when 9/11 broke, and that he was very much an outsider at the time. “Whether the emotions at work at the time were fear or whether they were insecurity, really doesn’t much matter because both of those were wonderful motives,” he said.

The Globe had to tackle matters of religion, public policy, national security, airport security, an economic crisis and military action in the next days. “Fortunately for The Globe, we had about a half a dozen people in New York at the time of the attacks,” Baron said. “We started with a big advantage.”

Baron recalled the scramble in the office that day. “I was one of only two people in the office at the time,” he said.

The Globe offered their first special editions ever on Sept. 11. “We were to have a special edition ready for printing by noon. That meant all stories had to be in by 11 that morning. We did what we had to do.”

Baron outlined several ways that the Globe has changed since he arrived. “Before I started, I read the paper for about a month, cover to cover,” he said.

“I think the great strengths of the paper before I got there were a very talented staff with exceptional writers and exceptional reporters. I think it had a tremendous breadth as well as far as what we covered overseas with foreign correspondents,” Baron said.

There were several things he chose to concentrate on. “We’re now driven by the news,” he said. Baron stressed “how much harder-edge we’ve become.”

He believes that The Globe should be the best regional paper in America. “I think our job is to help shape the public policy agenda of the Boston area and also in the fields that are prominent in New England and have national following,” Baron said.

Baron also responded to complaints about coverage at UMass-Amherst. “I’m sure we don’t cover everything in Amherst,” Baron said. “There’s a lot of demands on us in covering things that happen in the city of Boston.”

“We’re covering different institutions, medical institutions, financial institutions, we’re covering what’s happening in Washington that has a bearing on our readership, we’re having to cover matters of war and terrorism,” Baron said.

“We have tremendous demands on our resources,” he said. “We have to figure out the best way to deploy those resources. We do think it is tremendously important to cover higher education. There are many colleges and universities to cover just within our immediate area.”