“All the News Worth Reading: The ‘Christian Science Monitor’ and the Professionalization of Journalism”

Squires, L. Ashley. “All the News Worth Reading: The ‘Christian Science Monitor’ and the Professionalization of Journalism.” Book History, vol. 18, 2015, 235–72.

In the early 1900s, damaging newspaper accounts of the Next Friend’s Suit by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and McClure’s Magazine’s scathing series about Mary Baker Eddy became the incentive for her church founding its own newspaper—The Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor’s intent was to be a more professional alternative sticking closely to facts and “filter[ing] out… all that is unnecessary or offensive” (238). This journalistic shift corresponded with Christian Science theology that highlighted optimism rather than fear. It emphasized “…any news that might be construed as positive or pointing to mankind’s trajectory toward enlightenment, peace, and prosperity” (259). However, this orientation “failed to illuminate systemic abuses of power or to present the perspective of people who might have had a grievance” (265). The implication that humanity was on a path of inevitable spiritual fulfillment appealed to middle- and upper-class readers because it validated the status quo, whereas working class readers inclined toward “progressive muckraking” (238) which spoke truth to power with the intent of social reform. The Monitor was also meant to be a “soft influence” (255) helping to dampen the polemic around the church, and to place Christian Science in the mainstream of intellectual life.

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ISSN: 1529-1499
Print ISSN: 1098-7371

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2015.0001

See also annotations:

“Did the Monitor Report on the 1921 Tulsa Massacre” by The Mary Baker Eddy Library

“What Were Some of the Ways The Mother Church responded to the Racial Unrest in the 1960s?” by The Mary Baker Eddy Library

Covering McCarthyism: How “The Christian Science Monitor Handled Joseph R. McCarthy (1950-1954)” by Lawrence Strout