For the Christian Science Monitor , whether to send reporters to cover the Iraq War was never in question. Even as the conflict worsened and the number of insurgent attacks increased, the Monitor maintained its Baghdad bureau, with its two veteran Middle East reporters and two or three stringers. Other news organizations shuttered their Iraq bureaus because of the danger and the expense. But even though financially strapped, the Monitor never relied on wire service stories to fill its pages and prided itself on its independent international coverage.

That attitude could be traced to the newspaper’s creator, Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston in 1879. Nearly three decades later, at age 87, she launched the Christian Science Monitor in response to the “yellow” journalism of her day. The mandate she set for her new publication was—and remained—“to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” Although affiliated with the church, the Monitor was not intended to propagate Christian Science. Eddy wanted her newspaper to be nondenominational, though she insisted the newspaper’s name contain the words “Christian Science.”

Christian Science Monitor building, Boston

Since its founding, the Monitor had won numerous awards for its coverage, including seven Pulitzer Prizes; the most recent was for international reporting in 1996 . The recipient was David Rohde, whom the prize committee lauded for “his persistent on-site reporting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.” Rohde had gone behind Serb lines, unbeknownst to his editors, while covering the Balkan war and found evidence of the massacre. He was detained by the Serbs, jailed and interrogated because he didn’t possess the proper papers. The Monitor editors tried to negotiate his release. Ingwerson , then a reporter in the Monitor’s Moscow bureau, appealed to the Russian foreign ministry to pressure the Serbs for Rohde’s release. “But I didn’t get anywhere,” Ingwerson says. ^[1] Rohde was freed after 10 days in captivity.

By 2006 the Monitor , which published Monday through Friday, maintained eight bureaus around the world despite its budget constraints. ^[2] The newspaper operated at a deficit. Over the years, it had endured budget cuts, staff layoffs, a decreased page count, and a declining readership. At its height in the 1970s, the newspaper had a circulation of nearly a quarter-million; by 2005, its circulation had fallen to about 58,000. ^[3]