Cohen and Bravo found themselves in a difficult situation when, after filming the first season of 'Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,' one of the husbands, Russell Armstrong, committed suicide. Cohen says he and others at the network had many conversations about what they should do. "I reached out to [Russell's wife] Taylor every way I could, but never heard back," he wrote. "[Executive producer and writer] Alex Baskin spoke with her many times and she was adamant that every scene be shown, that if people were really going to understand what happened.... they'd need to see all the events as they happened." Bravo ended up cutting a few scenes which now had unfortunate implications, such as another housewife complaining that she "could kill [her] husband," and a couple of scenes which showed bad events in the Armstrongs' marriage, but Russell Armstrong did feature in the series later. "We felt we'd do him a greater disservice by cutting him out entirely," Cohen wrote. "You humanize him by seeing him instead of just hearing that he's a bad guy. In the end, what we had, unfolding throughout the season's twenty episodes, was an honest depiction of what happened to a woman in the midst of an unhappy marriage."
Mark Sappenfield
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.
