To Injure No Man, But Bless the Left

I was a subscriber to the daily Christian Science Monitor. After a couple of trials, I judged their reporting to be from a neutral viewpoint. Religion appeared in every issue, but did not color the news. The coverage, although U.S.-centered was truly global. And the lighter features were usually interesting (they had great, brief film reviews).

My full-time subscription began around the time the world was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003. I let it lapse after a couple of years because I wasn’t finding the time to read all the coverage they packed into a daily paper. I still followed the website regularly (it’s offered in NRR’s news rack).

The Monitor was not above the changing economics of the newspaper business. The daily print edition was halted. They tried some gated online content. I never paid, certain I could live well enough without it. But when the Monitor offered a weekly print digest, I was quick to sign up. Reading news online is tiresome, particularly for the longer stories the Monitor was good at.

I’ve been receiving the weekly for a few months. It is a major disappointment. The Monitor appears to have gone chasing the readers of newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. There’s now a decidely lefty slant in the reporting. The regular columnists are no longer challenging, but instead soft partisans discovered on the ash heaps of other Big Media outlets. The coverage is still pleasantly global, but almost always with some tie-in to globalistical warmening or cultural pollution by U.S. interests. That the Monitor bought completely into the climate change hoax is a marker that they’re not longer about truth, but about an agenda.

Maybe that is where the readers are. I am not.

And as further testimony, outside my own eyes, that the Monitor has fallen from a journalistic ideal, listen to Neo-neocon:

Yesterday John Patick Bedell walked up to the Pentagon and shot two officers there before being killed himself. Bedell hated George Bush and was a 9/11-truther. And yet Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor calls him he was a right-wing fanatic. Bedell hated the government and the armed forces, as well. Typical right-wing sentiments, of course!

Grier doesn’t even try to explain how it is that these things made Bedell a man of the right rather than the left (or even, perhaps, just a confused and demented man). Perhaps Grier thinks it’s self-explanatory, obvious to any thinking person: Bedell had a gun; he shot two people. Man of the right.

Checking the Monitor site, they’ve added an update to this Pentagon shooter story:

As more information emerges about Mr. Bedell, the less it appears that any coherent ideology was behind his actions, except that he was deeply antigovernment.

Many—me included—scan headlines for a snapshot of current events. But this story’s headline and teaser remain thus:

John Patrick Bedell: Did right-wing extremism lead to shooting?

Authorities have identified John Patrick Bedell as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting. He appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

If there is no coherent ideology behind the shooter, wouldn’t responsible journalism require updating the headline, too?

As more information emerges, it appears the Christian Science Monitor is coherent with the ideology of the left. It’s a crowded market. And a failing one.

My subscription is lapsing in a couple of weeks. I won’t miss it.