Christian Science Rift : High-Tech Heresy at the Monitor?

Newspapers by nature are the kind of thing people take personally. Just ask any editor about the irate phone calls that pour in after each decision to drop a comic strip.

Now imagine if someone makes sweeping changes in a newspaper that is literally a religious mission, changes that provoke a debate about the very foundation of the religion.

That, in short, explains how events at the Christian Science Monitor have become the vortex of a crisis of faith at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, the small, 110-year-old religious sect based in Boston and known largely for embracing spiritual healing and for publishing its venerable newspaper.

Full-Color Version

In November, the three top editors of the Monitor resigned, charging that the church’s expansion into television and radio broadcasting was threatening the future of the 80-year-old journal. Last month, the church introduced a much smaller, full-color Monitor in a year when it was spending at least $65 million on radio, television and magazines.

But confidential church documents, videotapes, financial data and interviews reveal that the story goes far deeper. Some members of the church are convinced, based on these documents, that the church management secretly planned to eliminate the deficit-ridden newspaper in favor of building an electronic media empire that would attract new members.

Church officials say such charges misstate their intentions. And they have lashed out against the critics, accusing one of undermining “the efforts of present management to achieve a profit through greater efficiency.”

Yet some church members worry that, even if it is moving in the right direction, the leadership is endangering the church’s future financially by its attempts to rapidly build a full-spectrum media empire.

More Troubling Question

And at its heart, the debate involves a more troubling question that transcends Christian Science: Is the quality of ideas and discourse being fundamentally debased in a world dominated by television?

As renowned church scholar Robert Peel put it last year in a book: “Will Christian Scientists put their whole heart and soul into strengthening the church’s healing mission through deeper individual spirituality and commitment? Or will the organization pour its faith, funds and energy into extending electronically a watered-down version of the original message?”

Launched by church founder Mary Baker Eddy in 1908, the Monitor has always been a curious mix of journalism, religion and business. Through quality news gathering, it was supposed to fulfill the church mission of helping society and of keeping the flock from becoming too insular, its profits to accrue to the church. Today, the debate over the Monitor is largely one about which of these three values should predominate.

Over the years, the Monitor’s reputation swelled; it regularly made lists of the country’s 10 best newspapers, admired for its determinedly objective reporting and broad coverage of national and international developments. In so doing, it also helped become a source of pride that kept the tiny sect from being dismissed as a cult.

Until 1961, it even turned a profit. Then, as national advertising drifted to television, the Monitor’s losses built up, totaling $166 million between 1970 and 1987, according to confidential church documents provided to The Times by numerous sources.

At the same time, officials did not quarrel with published reports that church membership was dwindling, the number of churches dropping by nearly 20% in two decades. Though the church no longer releases figures, membership was 269,000 in 1936 and is thought to be lower now.

Worldwide Video

To rejuvenate the church, its governing board of directors in 1984 conducted a worldwide video conference called “To Live for All Mankind,” in which it called on members to focus less on individual and church problems and more on those of the outside world.

To rejuvenate the paper, the church in the early 1980s hired as manager John H. Hoagland Jr., a business consultant and church member, and as editor Katherine Fanning, one of the most prominent Christian Science journalists in the country. And the paper improved, in both areas.

But by 1985, the Monitor was still losing $16 million a year, its circulation mired near 150,000, down from a high of 170,000 in the 1950s, and Hoagland decided that the paper could not be made profitable.

Everyone agreed that changes were needed. The question was how to make them.

Hoagland, with the backing of Harvey Wood, the senior member of the board of directors, increasingly began talking about the Monitor as a “concept” or “a complete system” of communication rather than simply as the newspaper Eddy had founded.

“It would be foolish to argue that TV is not the medium on which most people depend,” Hoagland said in an interview. To stay “abreast of the times,” he said, echoing the church’s governing manual, the church needed to understand how modern communication worked.

Generally, people now get news from radio, a visual and emotional sense of the world from TV and a sense of how to interpret events from print, Hoagland said.

In private sessions with church leaders, Hoagland argued that the church’s publishing society, which also produces its religious literature, could turn a profit and reach a wider audience through radio and television. The church elders were persuaded.

Weekend Show

They began a weekend radio news show in 1984 on public radio, which went nightly in 1985. They started a monthly TV news program in 1985, and in 1986 bought television Channel 68 in Boston, on which eventually they would spend an estimated $31 million.

And the move toward electronic news gathering was mirrored by changes on the religious side. The same year they bought Channel 68, church directors conducted another worldwide video conference, this one called “Global Lecture Preparatory Meeting.” In it, elder Wood argued that members had “been speaking largely to themselves . . . in formats that were outdated.”

The acquisitions and the rhetoric were spawning a debate inside the church: Could television carry on the church mission of quality journalism?

“The obverse weakness of a medium (television) that inherently treats the evidence of the eyes as decisive reality . . . is that it tends to be facile and superficial and to sacrifice . . . the very qualities that have given Monitor journalism its reputation,” Bonn correspondent Elizabeth Pond would write three years later, when she resigned from the paper.

While the argument continued, the strategy accelerated. The church launched a shortwave radio service in 1987, airing news and religious broadcasts overseas. It will cost $11 million to run this year, excluding $20 million in construction costs.

Also last year, the church added a slick monthly magazine and what Hoagland in confidential church documents has described as a crucial element, a nightly TV news program, “World Monitor,” hosted by former network correspondent John Hart.

Affluent Readers

The program, which airs nightly on cable’s Discovery Channel, resembles ABC’s “Nightline”--mixing taped reports and conversations with experts--but touches on more than one subject, usually international affairs, each night. It will cost at least $20 million to produce each year, church officials said, not including acquiring equipment and building facilities, and so far has a limited audience.

The monthly World Monitor magazine, meanwhile, is aimed at younger and more affluent readers than the five-day-a-week Monitor newspaper, according to editor Earl Foell, and will make heavy use of expert authors rather than simply journalists. It will cost $7 million to operate next year.

The figures have alarmed some church members. A “dizzying rush into electronic media,” Monitor Washington Bureau Chief Charlotte Saikowski called it upon resigning. And frankly, some wonder if the expansion is so rapid and expensive that the church is risking financial ruin.

In the current fiscal year alone, the magazine, shortwave and TV ventures will cost the church between $65 million and $75 million. To pay for it, the church over the last three years will have liquidated nearly two-thirds of its unrestricted pool of funds, from $167 million to about $60 million by next May.

In a memo, federal judge and prominent church member Thomas Griesa wrote that “the church’s financial condition (now) is extremely difficult” and “this situation is caused by expanding much too fast into a number of very speculative endeavors.”

Church Treasurer Donald C. Bowersock adamantly disagrees. He said that Griesa and others forget that $20 million to $25 million of this year’s broadcasting expenses are capital investments, which won’t be needed again.

Yet the seeming speed of the expansion has left some wondering whether the church officials were hoping that the media strategy would divert attention from the church’s internal problems and perhaps woo new members--as if “they see TV as a magical tool that can renew the church,” as one young former Monitor reporter and church member put it, requesting anonymity.

Not so, said John Selover, chairman of the church directors. “The survival of the church is far more attuned to how much good it can do than to how many members there are.”

Nor by Selover’s reckoning, are the moves high risk. “I don’t want to be blue sky, but . . . to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves, those words have motivated this whole thing and they have never been bankrupt and never would,” he said in an interview.

Suspicion, Intrigue

But as time progressed, suspicion and intrigue at church headquarters clouded the philosophical and financial arguments, and eventually two camps emerged. And at the center of it was the belief by one that management wanted to kill off the money-losing Monitor--an act church management in interviews called “unthinkable.”

Critics turn to internal documents to support their argument that management wanted to shut down the paper. In a confidential five-year plan in 1985, for instance, Hoagland outlined five “probable scenarios” for the future of the church’s media, three of which involved eliminating the Monitor. One option--a weekly paper and various broadcasting efforts--”may well be the best overall plan,” the document reads.

The next year, church management prepared a letter for members announcing that the publishing society would introduce a weekly paper into the United States and dramatically raise the price of the daily, from $140 a year to about $200.

To editor Fanning and others, the letter was a further step in a plan to kill the Monitor. Not only did they believe that the weekly and daily would weaken each other by competing in the same market, but they had never been informed that management had indeed considered this course.

Fanning and Managing Editor David Anable threatened to resign unless management made some commitment to the daily paper in the letter and described plans for the weekly as tentative, according to Anable.

The letter was changed, but the flame of distrust was not extinguished.

In August, 1987, Hoagland conducted an all-day meeting on the future of church media with the publishing society board of trustees, which runs the church media under the auspices of the church’s overall board of directors.

Fanning and her deputies were not included, in fact not even formally notified that the meeting had taken place until two months later, after the board of trustees and board of directors had formally approved its findings.

Financial Promise

According to a videotape of that session and more than 100 pages of documents obtained by The Times, Hoagland saw great financial promise in broadcasting, none in the daily newspaper. He also presented two budgets--a traditional one with all media continuing, and an “alternate” in which only shortwave and a proposed daily TV news program remained. Gone were all other news efforts, including the Monitor.

“We would recommend the alternate that we’ve shown here,” Hoagland says on the videotape.

Many who have seen the tape view it as further proof that management wanted to kill the paper.

Treasurer Bowersock, then chairman of the trustees, said that the presentation was designed “to get the board’s attention,” rather than as a literal recommendation. “He was running it up the flag pole to see what would happen,” and people said no.

Hoagland and other board members also insist that they never planned to kill the Monitor, which Hoagland contended “will be here forever.” But “to deny the ability of management to say those issues and to say them out loud would be to deny management its integrity,” he said.

And indeed, while the trustees and later the directors endorsed Hoagland’s “direction and emphasis,” according to church documents, the alternate plan has not been followed.

But sometime in the fall of 1987, Fanning told managing editor Anable and others that Hoagland had informed her the Monitor would shut down for good in the spring of 1989. Hoagland flatly denies that. Fanning, traveling in Asia, could not be reached for this article.

Fanning spent most of 1988 heading a task force to redesign the Monitor and cut the paper’s annual deficit to about $10 million. She presented her findings in October, but the board rejected them, choosing instead a plan by Richard A. Nenneman, a member of Hoagland’s management team. That plan proposed changing the Monitor even more radically, eliminating advertising, cutting staff substantially and reducing the number of pages from an average of 32 per issue to 16.

But according to church documents, long before either prototype could be begun, the board had set on a course that it knew would force Fanning out.

Staff Reorganization

In 1987, Hoagland had recommended a staff reorganization, in which the Monitor would share its news bureaus with the church’s TV and radio divisions. A new editor in chief, ranking above Fanning, would coordinate the effort. According to Wood, the senior director of the church, the board knew that Fanning disliked the plan. She argued that the Monitor should take precedence over the more speculative TV and radio ventures.

“We knew the moment we made that decision for that organizational change, Kay would not stay,” Wood told the paper’s Washington bureau after Fanning resigned, according to a transcript of that meeting.

What the board did not expect was that managing editor Anable, his deputy, David Winder, and many of the Monitor’s best known and most talented staff members also would resign.

Amid the crisis, the church made rapid changes in the new Monitor from Nenneman’s prototype. It went back up to 20 pages and included two pages of advertising. And, most significantly, the paper added full color.

But the move to color forced another change that drove even more people to resign and has drastically altered the character of the newspaper. To print and distribute the paper on time, most stories in the Monitor now must be completed and edited two days before most readers will read the paper.

“The Monitor has lost its purpose, identity and direction,” one editor said in his resignation letter. One joke now calls the paper “USA Yesterday.”

Nenneman and Hoagland, however, argue that their reader surveys show that people no longer read the Monitor for breaking news but for interpretation of longer term international and national events. In effect, they argue, the paper is streamlining to focus on its strengths.

But even some at the Monitor who believe Nenneman and Hoagland said privately that they fear that, once reporters are removed from gathering news, their ability to analyze and interpret it is greatly diminished.

And the critics also wonder whether the Monitor can maintain its quality with a staff drastically cut back, from 170 to about 110, with some of those remaining now sharing their responsibilities with radio and television.

In the end, it may come down to what extent the Monitor is viewed as a business and not simply as a mission.

“The logic of Christian Science demands that an ailing church be treated as an ailing patient would be--with total commitment to spiritual ways and means, not human skills and repairs,” wrote scholar Peel.

The Monitor is a mission and a business both, argues management. As Hoagland once put it to church officials in a report, “A sense of order and of integrity (is derived) . . . through its requirement to be a business enterprise.”

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MEDIA EMPIRE

REDESIGN--The 80-year-old Monitor changed its format last month, including use of full-color pictures.

FINANCIAL RESULTS--Operating revenues of the company.

Fiscal 1988 Fiscal 1989 (ending April 30) (estimated) Channel 68 and syndicate $7.2 million $9.8 million Shortwave radio $7.2 million $10.8 million Monitor newspaper $19.1 million $16.5 million Monitor magazine $2 million $7 million Radio (broadcast) $4.8 million $4 million TV $11.3 million $17 million Religious magazines $1 million 0

* The church also spent $9 million in 1988 and another $21 million in 1989 in capital expenditures in the building of the shortwave facilities.

SOURCE: Church figures and church member Thomas Griesa