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Readers write: Trump editorial coverage

Letters to the editor for the Feb. 20, 2017 weekly magazine.

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Evan Vucci/AP
President Donald Trump (r.) meets with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Feb. 13, 2017.
  • By Joan Greig Monitor reader
  • Carolyn Muir Monitor reader

Trump editorial coverage

Regarding Milton Love’s Dec. 26, 2016, letter criticizing the lack of editorial comment about Donald Trump in the Monitor: I agree 100 percent with his remarks and have been very frustrated throughout the past year at the most bland coverage of Mr. Trump, whose win of the presidency was based on hatred, discrimination, and division. 

He exemplifies all the things we’ve been taught to deplore since early childhood: lying, cheating, hatefulness, pettiness, name-calling, selfishness, bigotry, bravado, etc. 

The way he conducts himself is the opposite of how a president should behave, let alone a human being. 

The lack of a moral stance in this election has been very disappointing.

Joan Greig

Aurora, Ohio

Milton Love’s remarks in your Readers Write column regarding the Monitor’s political coverage highlighted one of the things I love about the Monitor: namely that, while it may constructively criticize actions, opinions, and policy, I have not seen the Monitor defame someone’s character, even slightly. To do so would be counter to its stated mission to “injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” 

This is so needed when degrading terms such as “liar,” “crook,” “bigot,” and “unfit” are being liberally lavished on everyone holding or running for public office. 

This practice dragged down 2016’s US electoral process and the press coverage of it in ways certainly not seen before in my not-so-short lifetime. 

The complete cessation of applying such character-defaming labels (and encouragement in this direction by the press) would do much to heal this country and our troubled world at large. 

I have never appreciated this aspect of Monitor coverage more than I have over the past year, and I thank the Monitor for leading the way in this regard!

Carolyn Muir

O’Fallon, Mo.

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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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