Why is the Christian Science Monitor of all papers the one that gets science journalism right? Who are these folks as an organization? I'm not American so I haven't run into them much; I just associate the words "Christian Science" with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science
You're right to associate the two. The paper originally started because the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, was originally being hounded left and right by churches and other traditional institutions for her offshoot of Christianity. One of the avenues that this happened was through newspapers. This was pretty common at the time and pretty shameful. So she created The Christian Science Monitor as a result, not necessarily to push her religion, but because she wanted some fair press somewhere. The paper itself is secular and has been known to put out some pretty compelling reporting from time to time. It was especially well regarded during the '60s and '70s when our country was going through a rough political time. Edit: I used to read them a lot back in the early 2000s. I don't quite remember why I stopped, it was probably one of those things where I just didn't keep on reading them. I think I might add them back into my news rotation. Edit 2: Apparently even Mark Twain got aboard the anti-Eddy train. Is there anyone in his lifetime he didn't pick a fight with?
I poked around a bit and it looks the church pulled back from more direct control, maybe. Sounds like the church put a non-journalist church member in charge in the early 2000s and later put professional journalist back in charge later in the decade. I'm not sure what the background of the current leadership is. I remember a bunch sky is falling pieces in the mainstream press when a church member took control back in the day but I can't find much good analysis of weather the quality of the paper has suffered from the changes. Sounds like the Monitor had as much trouble as any other paper adjusting to the new media landscape and that it might be hard to tell what changes are because of changes in the media landscape and which are from leadership changes.
Interesting. Any idea how it ended up being so secular (although apparently it's less so nowadays)? I read a few other articles and I really couldn't tell it's somehow associated with Christian Science; I'd expect a paper originally started by a fairly, well, crank-y offshoot of Christianity to be wildly different.
So, I've done some poking around and I honestly don't know. Like I said earlier, I really can imagine it going either direction. That said, I poked around the site a bit last night and the articles aren't half bad. I think I'll put it in my weekly news rotation (it doesn't seem to update often enough for me to check it daily). I'm sorry I don't have a concrete answer.