Article December 23, 1922 Issue

It [The Christian Science Monitor] carries into its columns...

Excerpt from an article by Oswald Garrison Villard which appeared in—New York, N. Y.

The Nation

It [The Christian Science Monitor] carries into its columns and into its editorials a truly Christian spirit, a desire to help, to benefit, and to improve. It aims with much success to be sweetly reasonable with wrongdoers, to give offense as rarely as possible. It tries to give full credit to the other man's motives. In its news columns it seeks to present accurately and fairly the things it is permitted to report. It is proud of its staff of correspondents, and its correspondents are proud of it. Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, one of its numerous non-Scientist correspondents abroad, has said of it that he was happy to write "for the one great newspaper in America that had a world vision, whose policy is to cover the entire world and to present the news of the world. ... I mention the Monitor because it is this conception of journalism that is the hope of the world." Upon none of these correspondents has the Monitor laid any restrictions. Much of its correspondence is of great value—the editors of The Nation are happy to acknowledge their indebtedness to it for much that has been significant and illuminating, for news that has sometimes appeared exclusively in the Monitor, or far ahead of its appearance elsewhere. ... The salient and striking fact is that the Monitor, unlike so many of its contemporaries, seeks to place its foreign correspondence on the level of that of the best English newspapers, and to give an intelligent survey of what is happening in all parts of the world. It keeps its news standards up and calls upon its readers to rise to them. Nor does it cast a Christian Science hue over all that it writes. Indeed, I think it must be said that it attempts to proselytize extraordinarily little. Every day it carries on an inside magazine page called the Home Forum a column of Christian Science, which also appears about once a week in German and in French. The Monitor has a remarkable international circulation in which as "an international daily newspaper" it delights. Not more than one or two newspapers, if any, print as much foreign news; it prints more than any other newspaper, if we leave out those like the Philadelphia Public Ledger, which have their own syndicates; and it claims that it prints more cable news than either the New York Times or the Public Ledger. It never buys or sells syndicate matter, because of its widespread circulation; it feels that it would be a drawback to have a subscriber in Los Angeles read dispatches of a news service that had already appeared in a Los Angeles daily. Indeed, the Monitor has to conceive of itself as almost more of a daily magazine than a newspaper—that is, its editors have to consider how their editions will read from six to twelve or eighteen days after publication. Its managers are proud of the fact that they have between twelve and fifteen thousand readers in California and ten thouusand in Great Britain, that they sell more papers in Chicago than in Boston, and that ten per cent of their readers are non-Scientists.

The Monitor is read by clergymen of various denominations because of the cleanness of its columns and the extent of its news. To some people it seems as if it did not cover domestic news as well as foreign. But if it has correspondents all over the world—a "space" correspondent, for instance, in every German town—a bureau in London with twelve on the editorial staff, and special representation in Berlin, Tokio, and other capitals, it has also a well-manned New York office with a dramatic, an art, and a musical critic attached to it—few American dailies take the stage, the concert hall, and the art museum as seriously. ... But the Monitor is never sloppy, is abundantly and often handsomely illustrated, and it gives excellent business and sporting news. ... But because it is the organ of a society established upon an ethical basis; because it has such ready-made bases of support; because it is entirely without the profit-motive and beyond the lure of dividents; and because it has conceived its mission to be international, it is one of the most interesting and vital of contemporary journalistic experiments. It cannot be overlooked by any one who seeks an answer to the riddle which reads: What is to be the newspaper of the future, and how can it be kept free from that commercial control which has so degraded the press of to-day?

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