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2012's legacy: The Monitor's Top 11 US stories

From storms to politics, the year was a wild ride. What are the most meaningful US stories of 2012? Here's the Monitor's list, in roughly chronological order.

Attack in Benghazi, Libya

Esam Al-Fetori/Reuters
An exterior view of the US consulate, which was attacked and set on fire by gunmen on Sept. 11 in Benghazi, Libya. Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, and three Embassy staff were killed during the attack.

  • By Staff The Christian Science Monitor

By the end of the year, the Sept. 11 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, risked being reduced to a political scandal over what the Obama White House knew about the attack and how it selected the information to reveal to the American people about it. Coming inquiries and congressional hearings will determine if that happens.

But the attack itself stands out for questions it raises about America's preparedness for a changed Islamist extremist threat, as well as for the uncertainties it casts on the future of US diplomacy in a growing registry of dangerous places. The assault by Al Qaeda-sympathizing extremists took the lives of four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

One reason the attack was so shocking is that it offered such a contrast with the Benghazi of just a year earlier, when a not-yet-ambassador Stevens had been warmly received there as the US envoy to rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi.

– Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer

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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.

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