All the News Worth Reading: The "Christian Science Monitor" and the Professionalization of Journalism

Even though it is owned by a controversial religious organization, the Christian Science Monitor has been a mainstay of objective, internationally oriented newspaper reporting for more than 100 years. This article contextualizes the founding and early success of the Monitor in the sociology of journalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that the Monitor’s reportorial style merged Christian Science’s optimistic theology with more conservative trends in reporting, a response to the more radical styles of muckrakers and yellow journalists, who had covered the church extremely negatively in the years just prior to the emergence of the Monitor .