Article November 28, 1908 Issue

A WELCOME TO THE MONITOR

Pasadena (Cal.) News

An up-to-date daily newspaper is to be published in Boston under the auspices of the Christian Scientists of this country. The announcement states that all the news of the day that should be published will find a place in its columns, and its up-to-date news service will cover the daily activities of the entire world. The key-note of this publication, as indicated by the well-known attitude of Christian Scientists, will be to eliminate from the columns of the daily press the unwholesome surfeit of disease-suggestion and crime-suggestion, and to carry into the homes of the people an efficient news service conducive to wholesome and optimistic thinking. Its mission will be the lessening of tragedy, crime, impurity, and bad citizenship by developing a taste for and an interest in the best rather than the worst that the world is thinking and doing.

We shall watch for this new star in the journalistic firmament with something more than idle curiosity. All advocates of clean and responsible journalism will greet this stranger in the field with expectancy and a sympathetic hope for full success in its worthy mission. The journal which carries no intellectual swill to its readers and feeds no demand for impure suggestion will have its critics. Its early downfall will be predicted and its practicability be impeached in advance. If it can be demonstrated that there are enough American firesides where the clean, uplifting, hopeful happenings of the world are in demand, to make such a venture a journalistic and financial success, it will prove a most substantial aid in lessening the burden of sorrow and of crime by improving the quality of the daily ration on which men and women, and particularly American youth, have been accustomed to feed intellectually.

The tendency has been quite too much in the opposite direction. So burdened with the details of the world's worst happenings have the columns of the press come to be, that into every home the metropolitan daily has dragged its load of poison, to bear its crop of evil thinking and evil doing. The effort to stem the tide of the popular demand for sensationalism and degrading filth by founding a metropolitan daily on faith in the development of a wholesome appetite, is one of the most encouraging signs of the times, and it deserves success. The world is old enough, and its Christianizing and civilizing influences have been at work long enough, to have prepared the way for just such a publication as is contemplated.

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