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Readers write: Budget reporting, golf changes, child's viewpoint

Letters to the editor for the June 19, 2017 weekly magazine.

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Brandon Dill/AP
Phil Mickelson gestures to fans on the 18th hole during the final round of the St. Jude Classic golf tournament on June 11, 2017, in Memphis, Tenn.
  • By David K. McClurkin Monitor reader
  • Stephen Andrew Monitor reader
  • Jeanne Mattole Monitor reader

Budget reporting

The very useful article on the latest White House budget proposal, the June 5 OneWeek piece “Trump budget reflects GOP values,” is a smart model of the broad perspective and balance so greatly needed in news reporting today. While I cannot agree with many of the choices taken by the administration in the document, I commend the Monitor for publishing such a grown-up view of the landscape, seen through such a clear lens.

David K. McClurkin

Beachwood, Ohio

Golf changes

Regarding the April 28 article “Why pro golf’s rule changes aren’t so leisurely this time” (CSMonitor.com): It’s great to see genuine common sense (and decency) triumph, and to do so quickly. Surely those wanting technology to prevail in scrutinizing play must also ensure that the very same technology is made available to the players themselves at the time they take the actions being inspected subsequently by such technology. That is what is called “fair play.”

Stephen Andrew

Montcalm, Quebec

Child’s viewpoint

The photo of Muslim immigrants in Copenhagen, Denmark, that accompanied the May 22 OneWeek article “Research links disgust to politics” takes me back to my childhood in New Jersey in the mid-to-late 1940s. Back then, my little friends had grandmas who dressed a lot like those ladies in Denmark. Those grammies were from Poland, Italy, and other war-torn European countries. Most were Roman Catholic. Like the Muslim women in the photo, the grandmothers wore long black skirts, big shoes, black stockings, and headscarves. They did not look like my grandma, who grew up and lived in the United States all her life. But I didn’t care. My friends’ grandmas were sweet. So what if they wore European mourning garb?

Why can’t we adults reason as children do?

Jeanne Mattole

Honeydew, Calif.

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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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