The Christian Science Monitor

• 1. Introduction

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  The Christian Science Monitor was born out of one woman's fury at a newspaper. In 1908, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, had grown tired of the New York World's relentless attacks on her. Her answer was to start a paper of her own. But what she built turned out to be something far larger than a defense against one critic.

  Eddy declared the mission plainly: "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." She also required that the words "Christian Science" appear in the title, brushing aside advisors who objected. From its first issue, the paper was based in Boston, and it has never left.

  Over the decades that followed, the Monitor won seven Pulitzer Prizes, gave Nelson Mandela reading material during his years in a South African prison, coined the term McCarthyism, and covered the kidnapping of one of its own reporters for 82 days in Baghdad. How a church newspaper became one of the more respected names in American journalism, and how it nearly destroyed itself trying to stay alive, is a story worth hearing.

• 2. Eddy's Vision

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  Mary Baker Eddy had a specific diagnosis for what ailed the American press. She looked at the newspapers of her day and concluded they were making readers sick, not just uninformed. In her own words: "Looking over the newspapers of the day, one naturally reflects that it is dangerous to live, so loaded with disease seems the very air. These descriptions carry fears to many minds, to be depicted in some future time upon the body."

  Her remedy was a paper that would reach homes with what she called "healing, purifying thought." This was not simply a religious aspiration. Eddy wanted the paper to function as a kind of antidote to the fear she believed was being manufactured and distributed by mainstream journalism.

  She was insistent that the name carry the words Christian Science, even when some of her own advisors pushed back. That tension between a religious identity and a secular journalistic mission would run through the paper's entire history. One way the balance was struck: each issue would contain a single religious article in the Home Forum section, generally tied to the day's news, and nothing more. The rest would be reported as straight news.

• 3. Pulitzers and Principle

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  Edmund Stevens won the Monitor's first Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for a series of 43 articles written over three years of living in Moscow, published under the title "This Is Russia Uncensored." It was the kind of deep, committed foreign reporting that would become a hallmark of the paper.

  Six more Pulitzers followed. R. John Hughes won for international reporting on Indonesia's attempted transition to a new political order in 1965 and the purge that followed into 1966. Howard James won in 1968 for a national reporting series called "Crisis in the Courts." Robert Cahn won the following year for examining the future of the United States' national parks. Richard Strout earned a special citation in 1978 for decades of distinguished commentary from Washington. David Rohde won in 1996 for on-site reporting of the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica genocide. Clay Bennett won in 2002 for editorial cartooning.

  Beyond the prizes, the paper took stands that were notable for their time. During the era of McCarthyism, a term the Monitor itself first coined, the paper was among the earliest critics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1997, a publication critical of United States policy in the Middle East praised the Monitor by name for objective and informative coverage of Islam and the Middle East.

• 4. Mandela and the Monitor

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  During the 27 years Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa after his conviction on charges including sabotage, The Christian Science Monitor was one of the newspapers he was permitted to read. That access was not incidental. The paper's coverage of apartheid was sustained and serious at a time when that was not universally true of the international press.

  Five months after Mandela's release, he traveled to Boston and stopped at the Monitor's offices. He told the staff that the paper "continues to give me hope and confidence for the world's future." He thanked them specifically for their "unwavering coverage of apartheid" and called the Monitor "one of the more important voices covering events in South Africa."

  That visit placed the paper in a particular position in its own history. It was recognized not for a single investigation or a single prize, but for the cumulative weight of sustained attention to a story most of the world preferred to look away from.

• 5. Jill Carroll's 82 Days

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  Jill Carroll was working as a freelance reporter on an assignment for the Monitor when she was kidnapped in Baghdad in 2006. She was not a staff writer at the time of her abduction, a fact that might have limited the paper's formal obligation to her. The Monitor chose a different path.

  The paper worked actively for her release and hired Carroll as a staff writer shortly after she was taken, specifically so she would have access to financial benefits during her captivity. She was held for 82 days before being released safely.

  Beginning in August 2006, the Monitor published an account of the kidnapping and release with first-person reporting from Carroll and from others involved in the ordeal. The decision to hire her mid-crisis, rather than after the fact, said something about how the paper understood its obligations to the journalists who worked for it.

• 6. Broadcasting Ambitions

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  MonitoRadio launched in 1984 as a radio service produced by the Church of Christ Scientist. It featured several one-hour news programs each day, along with news bulletins at the top of each hour, and it was widely carried by public radio stations across the United States. A shortwave arm, called the World Service of the Christian Science Monitor, followed, with weekday news programming and weekend schedules devoted entirely to religious content. The shortwave service closed on the 28th of June, 1997.

  The television ambitions ran deeper and ended worse. In 1986, the Monitor began producing a syndicated current affairs series called The Christian Science Monitor Reports. It won a Peabody Award in 1988 for reporting on Islamic fundamentalism. That same year, the series was cancelled. In its place, the paper created a daily television program called World Monitor, anchored by former NBC correspondent John Hart, which began on the Discovery Channel.

  In 1991, World Monitor moved to the Monitor Channel, a 24-hour news and information service launched on the 1st of May, 1991, operating out of the Boston television station WQTV. Religious programming was limited to a five-minute segment early each morning. Eleven months later, in 1992, the channel shut down amid what the source describes as huge financial losses. The broadcast programs had expanded faster than the revenue could follow, and the board was eventually forced to close them. The paper's circulation had peaked at over 223,000 in 1970; by 1989, the financial pressure had grown severe enough that chief editor Kay Fanning, managing editor David Anable, associate editor David Winder, and several other newsroom staff resigned in mass protest.

• 7. From Daily to Digital

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  In October 2008, the Monitor disclosed that it was losing US$18.9 million per year against annual revenue of only US$12.5 million. The announcement came with a decision: the paper would stop printing daily and shift to a weekly print edition instead. The last daily print edition appeared on the 27th of March, 2009.

  The weekly format had a precedent within the Monitor's own history. A London edition had run as a weekly since 1960. That was replaced in 1974 by a weekly World Edition. The new model drew on both.

  The Monitor had been moving toward digital for years before the print cutback. It was among the first newspapers to post its text online, doing so in 1996. It launched a PDF edition in 2001 and was an early adopter of RSS feeds. By late 2011, the site was drawing around 22 million hits per month, placing it slightly below the Los Angeles Times in web traffic. In 2017, a paywall went up. By 2018, the Monitor Daily email service had approximately 10,000 subscribers, and monthly web traffic had fallen to around 1 million hits. Mark Sappenfield became editor in March 2017. Christa Case Bryant succeeded him in February 2025.

• 8. In the Cultural Record

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  Two of the 20th century's most studied novels preserve a specific image of The Christian Science Monitor. In Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Christianity has been replaced by a pseudo-religion built around a deified Henry Ford. The Monitor survives into that future but is renamed The Fordian Science Monitor, its identity bent to fit the new theology.

  Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar takes a sharper angle. The narrator, Esther Greenwood, notes that the Monitor is the only thing delivered to her mother's house. She says she cannot read it because it "treated suicides and sex crimes and airplane crashes as if they didn't happen," and she prefers tabloid journalism instead.

  That Plath passage cuts against the paper's self-image in an interesting way. Eddy founded the Monitor to counteract the fear spread by coverage of disease and disaster. A character in a novel written 55 years later complains that the paper refuses to print the very stories Eddy set out to avoid. The restraint Eddy intended as a gift, Plath's narrator experienced as an erasure.