Our first century
A mandate to 'lighten' still drives the Monitor at the dawn of its second 100 years.
from the November 25, 2008 edition
Page 4 of 5
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From 1964 on, the Monitor provided intensive coverage of the growing US involvement in Vietnam with courageous, on-the-scene dispatches from staff members Takashi Oka, John Dillin, Daniel Southerland, and Elizabeth Pond.
1970-1980
The Monitor was buffeted by the Vietnam War and business losses during the 1970s.
Monitor correspondent Pond and two other journalists were taken prisoner by Communist forces in Cambodia on May 7, 1970. The trio had driven from Saigon to observe US and South Vietnamese operations on the main route from Saigon to Phnom Penh. Ms. Pond and her colleagues were released after more than five weeks of captivity.
As the war raged, a veteran foreign correspondent moved into the editor's office in October 1970. Hughes had been awarded a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, had won that 1967 Pulitzer, and shortly before being named editor won the Overseas Press Club award for best reporting from abroad.
On June 29, 1971, the Monitor followed the New York Times and the Washington Post in printing portions of the Pentagon Papers, a hitherto top-secret study of US policy in Vietnam commissioned by the Pentagon. Asked by the US Justice Department not to publish, Hughes said he "declined to accede" to the request. In an editorial the Monitor explained, "The proper role of a responsible press is to do its best at all times to tell those things which the public should know but governments would prefer to withhold."
Two major cost-saving changes in the Monitor occurred in the face of rising expenses. In October 1973 the Saturday edition was discontinued, and in April 1975 the paper moved from a broadsheet to a compact format. (Staffers were told not to use the word "tabloid.")
On the brighter side, in 1978 Richard L. Strout won the Pulitzer Prize "for distinguished commentary from Washington over many years as staff correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and contributor to The New Republic." Two generations of Monitor writers sought to emulate his acute observations and pungent style. "Dick Strout was our journalism school," wrote Earl W. Foell, who succeeded Hughes as editor in 1979.
1980-1990
The 1980s were a decade of experimentation and controversy at the Monitor.
Ms. Fanning was named editor in 1983, the first woman to lead the Monitor. Fanning previously had guided a paper she owned in Alaska to a Pulitzer Prize for a fearless examination of the Teamsters. In Boston, she was teamed with Publishing Society manager John H. Hoagland Jr., a Yale-educated business consultant and devoted Christian Scientist. Mr. Hoagland was tasked with finding a way to cure the Monitor's persistent deficits and expand its modest print audience in an era when TV was the dominant news delivery vehicle.
Millions of dollars were invested in the newspaper. Even more went into building a Monitor presence in radio and television. Weekend Monitor Radio broadcasts began in 1984, followed by a daily afternoon news program in 1985. An early morning Monitor radio program went on the air in 1989. The radio broadcasts eventually drew an audience of 1.1 million listeners a week on more than 200 public radio stations.
The Monitor's television experiments began in 1985 with a monthly 30-minute program on commercial TV stations called "Christian Science Monitor Reports." A weekly broadcast was launched in 1987 and in 1988 it won a George Foster Peabody award, the broadcast equivalent of a Pulitzer, for an examination of "Islam in Turmoil."
The decade's most expensive venture was "World Monitor" a nightly half-hour TV program with an annual budget in the $20-million range that aired on cable's Discovery Channel. The New York Times's review of the première said, "The sheer integrity of 'World Monitor' is invigorating." The program later won an Emmy for its international news coverage.
To expand the Monitor's presence in the world of print, a glossy monthly magazine was launched in October 1988. Also called World Monitor, it was edited by Mr. Foell, who was on a first-name basis with the world's movers and shakers. He could dash off witty memos with references to everyone from Agamemnon to Ataturk, and had uncanny news judgment. In the magazine's first issue, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford predicted the Berlin Wall would come down 13 months before it did so.
Meanwhile, disputes raged over proposed major reductions in the newspaper's staff and budget, and a media strategy dominated by broadcasting. Fanning resigned as editor in November 1988 at the end of what she said was a three-year dispute with the members of the board of trustees and board of directors over the Monitor's direction. Managing editor David Anable and assistant managing editor David Winder also resigned. In a Boston Globe interview, the three said they left rather than go along with a plan that would cut the Monitor's pages in half, eliminate all advertising, and have the editor report to the manager of the Christian Science Publishing Society rather than to members of the board of directors as was longstanding practice. The departures shocked the Monitor staff and triggered increased press scrutiny of the Publishing Society's broadcast-centric strategy.
No Monitor editor has ever assumed the office under more challenging conditions than Fanning's successor, Richard Cattani, who had been the paper's chief editorial writer. Mr. Cattani and crew began producing a smaller, four-color paper in January 1989, using cutting edge desktop-publishing equipment. "The most important achievement of the Cattani/Walker administration," says former deputy editor Ruth Walker, "was to keep the paper going at a time when its survival was very much in doubt."
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