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The Christian Science Monitor is an international daily newspaper published Monday through Friday. It was founded in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist. The paper relies primarily on its own reporters in bureaus in eleven countries around the world, for the most part church members, though decreasingly so in recent decades.
Despite its name, the Monitor was not established to be a religious-themed paper, nor does it seek to directly promote the church's doctrine. A daily religious article however has appeared in every issue of the Monitor since its founding, reportedly at Eddy's direct request. Eddy also specifically provided for the inclusion of "Christian Science" in the paper's name, over the initial opposition of some of her advisors, who thought it would not go over well with a secular readership.
The paper's inception was in part her response to the infamous yellow journalism of her day. Shortly after Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was published, the book's popularity caught the attention of Joseph Pulitzer. Eddy was 86 years old at the height of her popularity and wealth, when Pulitzer launched a campaign to wrest control of Eddy's estate from her through the attentions of his newspaper, the New York World. He eventually persuaded disaffected former friends and her one son to sue for control of her estate. The World harassed Eddy with prolonged controversy to force the case to court, where the "Next Friends Suit" was eventually dismissed. Eddy gave the Monitor the mission "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." Pulitzer went on to endow the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for journalism, which the Monitor subsequently went on to win seven times.
In comparison to other major newspapers and journalistic magazines, the Monitor tends to take a steadied and slightly upbeat approach to national and world news. Some of its readers prefer the Monitor because it avoids the sensationalism of some other media, particularly with respect to tragedies. At the same time, however, while promoting itself heavily on the basis of objectivity and integrity, under the close eye of the church's five-man board of directors, Monitor staff have strikingly shied away from reporting controversial and unfavorable church issues in detail or at all, such as the 1990s or 2004 financial crises, the borrowings from its employee pension fund, or the controversy surrounding the 1991 publication of the Bliss Knapp book to secure Knapp's nearly $100 million estate.
The Monitor, originally published in broadsheet and today in tabloid format (once with an international edition), has struggled since the 1960s to grow its readership base enough to turn a profit. This led the church's directors and the manager of the Christian Science Publishing Society to make plans for its cutbacks and closure (later denied), which led in 1989 to the mass protest resignations of its famed editor Kay Fanning (an ASNE president and former editor of the Anchorage Daily News), managing editor David Anable, associate editor David Winder, and a good number of newsroom staff. These developments presaged administrative moves shortly after to scale back the print newspaper in favor of expansions into radio, a glossy magazine, shortwave broadcasting, and television. Expenses, however, rapidly outpaced revenues in defiance of church directors' insistent predictions to the contrary, and the board was forced, on the highly public brink of bankruptcy, to close the broadcast programs down.
The print edition continued to struggle for readership, and in 2004 faced a renewed mandate from the Mother Church to make profits. The paper, even more so than other newspapers, turned to the World Wide Web for its future. The Web offered the paper the opportunity to overcome the severe cost and logistical difficulties of mailing out a daily newspaper. The Monitor was one of the first papers to put its text online (in 1998), and also one of the first to launch a PDF edition (in 2001). It was also an early pioneer of RSS_(protocol) feeds. Even as the website struggled to support itself with advertising, the print edition lost even more money, and laid off a number of staff.
The Christian Science Monitor (or "CSM" as it is known in the intelligence community) is widely read by CIA and other intelligence agency analysts because of its attention to accuracy and global perspective. Project Censored has noted that the Monitor often publishes factual articles discussing topics under-represented or absent from the mainstream mass media.
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ja:クリスチャン・サイエンス・モニター
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