Skip to footer

You ranked them: 10 top stories in America in 2013

Here are 10 top stories Americans followed in 2013, ranked by respondents to a Monitor/TIPP poll according to the percentage who said they followed the story very closely.

1. US government shutdown (73 percent)

Kevin Lamarque/ Reuters/ File
National Park Service workers remove a barricade at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial as it reopens to the public in Washington, Oct. 17, 2013, after a 16-day partial government shutdown precipitated by congressional budgetary gridlock.

  • By CSM Staff

In October, a partial shutdown of the federal government annoyed many Americans and dented an already weak economy.

Nonessential operations started grinding to a halt Oct. 1 because Congress hadn't passed a budget or done anything else to fund government for the fiscal year that began that day. For House Republican hard-liners, a twin set of fiscal deadlines – the dawn of the budget year and the Treasury's plea for Congress to raise the nation's arbitrary ceiling on public debt – offered a rare moment of political leverage against Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats. But the insurgents failed to win any tax or entitlement reform or to force a defunding of Obamacare.

What did happen? A 16-day shutdown that benefited neither party in opinion polls. Services deemed essential continued (Social Security checks kept flowing), but the episode may end up paring the economy's growth rate by 0.2 to 0.6 percentage points for the fourth quarter.

A bipartisan two-year compromise budget passed the House with overwhelming support Dec. 12. But the deal left the question: Would it merely postpone the next fiscal clash, or be a step toward more fiscal dealmaking?

– Mark Trumbull, Staff writer 

10 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.