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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.

5. George Zimmerman trial (46 percent)

Jason Redmond/ Reuters/ File
Protesters march in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles after the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial on July 13, 2013. A Florida jury acquitted Mr. Zimmerman of fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had become a polarizing figure in the national debate over racial profiling and self-defense laws.

  • By CSM Staff

On July 13, a six-woman jury in Sanford, Fla., found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin. The armed neighborhood watch captain had followed the unarmed teenager before claiming to fire in self-defense when the teen punched his pursuer.

The shooting of Trayvon and the subsequent trial of Mr. Zimmerman captivated America because the tragedy backlit twin racialized fears: the fear of young black men among some middle-class whites, and the fear among many black parents that violence against black children often goes unpunished.

The trial also invited intense reflection on several legal and cultural trends, including the proliferation of so-called stand-your-ground laws that allow armed citizens to shoot at the first hint of danger, and the rapid growth in the carrying of concealed weapons in public, as Zimmerman did.

After the verdict, Obama suggested that Americans should ask themselves a question in honor of Trayvon: "Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?"

– Patrik Jonsson, 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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