CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
The purpose of the Christian Science Monitor, Mary Baker
Eddy suggested in the lead editorial of the paper’s first issue
on November 25, 1908, was “to injure no man, but to bless
all mankind.” The conviction came from an episode of
personal humiliation administered by the press. The year
before Eddy, then eighty-six, had been targeted by Joseph
Pulitzer’s New York World for her unconventional religious
beliefs that in Pulitzer’s view only appealed to “hysterical women and weak-minded men.” Pulitzer encouraged
a competency hearing, filed by Eddy’s estranged son, to
determine her ability to administer a considerable estate.
She won, the case was dropped, and one hundred years later
the newspaper she started had won seven Pulitzer Prizes for
journalistic excellence.
Eddy’s claim that she had discovered a divine principle
that all physical diseases could be cured by spiritual and
not medical means led to her founding of the “Christian
Science” Church in 1879 and her derisive criticism in the
press. Mark Twain wrote that Eddy preyed upon the vulnerable for profit and was “vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic,
arrogant, insolent, and pitiless.” Willa Cather, Burton Hendricks, and Georgine Milmine, writing in the muckraking
McClure’s Magazine, were equally merciless. It was Eddy’s
view that what reaches and affects thought shapes experience. This was why “looking over the newspapers of the
day, one naturally reflects that it is dangerous to live, so
loaded with diseases seems the very air.” The Christian
Science Monitor was designed to “counteract this public
nuisance” that “carries fears to many minds.”
The Monitor’s first editor, Archibald McLellan, made
sure the paper “neither proselytizes nor preaches,” but
instead “published the real news of the world in a clean,
wholesome manner, devoid of the sensational methods
employed by so many newspapers.” McLellan’s city editor
was John L. Wright, who quit the Boston Globe to work for
a newspaper “that will place principle before dividends” and
could be “fair, frank, and honest” with its readers regardless
of “commercial or political pressures.” The Monitor did not
rely on news services for its content, but developed its own
U.S. and world news bureaus that eventually syndicated
stories to clients in the United States, Europe, the Middle
East, and Asia. Erwin D. Canham, the Monitor’s editor
throughout World War II and the early Cold War believed
the paper’s purpose was to help “citizens make informed
decisions and take intelligent action for themselves and for
society.” By the 1980s, Monitor editor Katherine W. Fanning maintained the paper’s “devotion to public service”
remained undiluted as was its aim “to enlighten, elevate,
and educate the reader.”
From the outset, the Monitor minimized reporting on
deaths and disasters, largely leaving crime news to other
dailies. The paper closely followed efforts to break large
trusts, quoting those in the reform community who claimed
the U.S. Supreme Court’s break up of the Standard Oil Trust
in May of 1911 “was designed to curb the rapacious exercise
of money power.” The story of the sinking of the Titanic in
April 1912 focused on the stories of survivors and corporate
responsibility for the calamity. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that sparked World War
I in June 1914 was described by the Monitor’s European
bureau as “another of those terrible incidents in the history
of the house of Hapsburg” and warned “of the effects of
this tragedy.” When the United States entered the war in
April 1917, the paper predicted the coming conflict and its
resolution would be “the most important in the history of
nations.” The war’s end in November 1918 provoked “universal rejoicing in every allied capital.” Under Frederick
Dixon’s editorship, the Monitor finished this first decade of its life with a circulation of 120,000 on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Willis J. Abbot fought for newspaper reform as Monitor editor in the 1920s. He had been a key player in the
creation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
(ASNE) in 1923 and favored the creation of a “Code of
Journalism” to quarantine the profession from the effect of
the tabloids. Abbot wanted a code of conduct that would be
enforceable on members who abused the public trust. He
was convinced that journalism’s drive toward professionalism was confounded by the era’s “appetite for sensationalism.” It had led, he argued, “to the daily chronicling of
that which is offensive in life and repugnant to ordinary
decency.” Throughout the 1920s, Abbot argued that it was
“intolerable” and “indefensible” that the nation’s leading
editors could not punish members for “unethical conduct.”
Abbot’s argument proved particularly persuasive to journalism’s young and college-educated editors, who thought the
Monitor’s success showed a paper did not have to celebrate
scandal, sex, sport, celebrity, and spectacle to turn a profit.
ASNE’s older, less idealistic editors, narrowly outvoted
Abbot’s initiative, arguing that “ethics are tied to box office
receipts,” and made ethics requirements on public service
non-binding for the nation’s newspaper editors.
Erwin D. Canham was drawn to the Monitor’s staff
because of its unabashed idealism. He served as its Washington correspondent during the New Deal years and early
saw signs that “in this great national emergency” that
Franklin D. Roosevelt would “make history.” Then Canham became a foreign correspondent, where he warned
of Adolf Hitler’s silencing of political opponents and “the
great tragedy of his Jewish persecution.” Before Hitler’s
military might and German occupation of Austria and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Canham wrote, Western
democracies seemed “unwilling to do anything bolder than
make speeches.” Canham became the Monitor’s managing
news editor in 1940, and its editor at the end of the war.
He oversaw a staff widely recognized as one of the best in
the newspaper industry. This included Joseph C. Harsch,
who reported from Berlin; Mallory Browne, Mary Hornaday, and Peter Lyne, based in London; Saville R. Davis,
who covered Mussolini; Edmund Stevens and Alexcander
Werth, who filed from Moscow; Ronald Stead, who reported
the Mediterranean campaign; and Randall Gould, Gordon
Walker, and Walter Robb, who reported developments in
the Far East. Canham’s Washington staff included Richard
L. Strout, Roscoe Drummond, William H. Stringer, Neal
A. Stanford, Joseph G. Harrison, and Josephine Ripley.
By 1961, the Monitor was firmly established as a nationwide newspaper boasting a circulation of 250,000. During
the decade, polls of editors, publishers, and journalism professors consistently rated the Christian Science Monitor as
one of the nation’s outstanding papers. In the decades that
followed, the paper concentrated on its Washington and foreign reporting, while also focusing on literature, music, and
art. Its interpretative analyses identified long-term issues in
world affairs, economics, and culture. In 1978, the paper
received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize Committee for “57 years of excellence in journalism.” Falling circulation figures in the 1980s, however, led to staff cutbacks
and mass resignations in 1989 that included Kay Fanning,
the paper’s editor, David Anable, managing editor, and
David Winder, associate editor. The Monitor, under news
editor Richard J. Cattani, promised to continue the paper’s
commitment to “unrelenting but fair-minded journalism.”
The paper maintained reporters in eleven countries and six
regional offices within the United States, providing stories
for the Monitor and a nationwide network of small weeklies and metropolitan dailies that subscribed to the Monitor
News Service.
Special projects of the Monitor included Rushworth
Kidder’s An Agenda for the 21st Century (1987), which had
interviews with twenty-two prominent Americans on the
major issues facing humanity in the twenty-first century;
and more broadly, the paper focused on important issues
that had been underreported in the mainstream media. The
Monitor went online in 1996 and launched a radio news
network. In the wake of terrorist attacks on the United
States on September 11, 2001, the paper received praise
for John K. Cooley’s reporting from the Middle East. The
January 7, 2006, kidnapping of Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, in Baghdad, was a major media story until her release
eighty-two days later. Richard Bergenheim, a Christian
Science practitioner who became the Monitor’s editor in
2005, was charged with the responsibility of improving the
paper’s profitability, while maintaining its long held view
that “no human situation is beyond healing or rectification
if approached with sufficient understanding of man’s Godgiven potentiality.”
Further Reading
Canham, Erwin D. Commitment to Freedom: The Story of the
Christian Science Monitor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1958.
Christian Science Monitor. Understanding Our Century: Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Christian Science
Monitor. Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society,
1984.
Danziger, Jeff. Used Cartoons: Political Cartoons from the
Christian Science Monitor. Boston: The Monitor, 1988.
The First 80 Years: The Christian Science Monitor, 1908–1988.
Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Co., 1988.
Hunter, Frederic, ed. A Home Forum Reader: A Timeless Collection of Essays and Poems from the Forum Page of the
Christian Science Monitor. Boston: The Monitor, 1989.
Ralston, Richard E., ed. Communism: Its Rise and Fall in the 20th
Century: From the Pages of the Christian Science Monitor.
Boston: Christian Science Publishing, 1991.
Bruce J. Evensen