Article January 9, 1909 Issue

In glancing over the pages of the great daily newspapers...

with contributions from Thomas Brown—Chicago.

Western British American

In glancing over the pages of the great daily newspapers of this country—the journals of immense circulation and corresponding influence—the average right-thinking man is often moved to wish that there was less of enterprise and more of morality in the business of journalism. The astounding progress of the modern newspaper-maker has been seemingly achieved at the expense of his better nature. "All the news that's fit to print" is a common caption with the press of the United States, but the "unfit" kind continues to get the largest amount of space and the most alluring head-lines and to be couched in the most readable guise. The man who invented the foregoing phrase is dead these many years; he meant well by it and he lived up to it; but his followers everywhere, who still cling to it as an advertisement, long ago ceased to put it into practice.

Our friends the Christian Scientists are opposed by many on account of their faith and philosophy, but mose people will wish them success in their latest enterprise—a daily newspaper that is to be clean as well as comprehensive. On Nov. 25 the first issue of The Christian Science Monitor made its appearance in Boston, Mass. It is to be a newspaper in all that the name implies; it is to cover the doings of the wide world and will leave out nothing of interest to readers who have a wholesome curiosity to know the events of the day in this and other lands. But, in presenting the current happenings, it will appeal to the ideal in human nature and not to its baseness and brutality. This is the innovation aimed at by the Christian Scientists, and it is a radical change in journalistic method that the better class of readers have often wished for.

The father of a family of imaginative boys and girls will not find it necessary to censor the Monitor. He will not be obliged to go over its pages with the scissors to eliminate grewsome murder mysteries and salacious divorce scandals. ... The valuable space given over by other daily papers to twaddle and gossip will be filled, in the Monitor's columns, with instructive reading, such as attractive home departments, hints for the business man, and honest editorials. Its advertising matter will be on a par with its news sections in point of reliability; no price will be big enough to boost fraud or help the sales of a swindler.

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