2023
August
17
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

August 17, 2023
Loading the player...
Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

The McCurtain Gazette and the Marion County Record are portraits of a past media age. Eric Meyer bought the Record in 1998 to prevent it from being sold to a corporate buyer; his father had worked there from 1948 until he retired. Bruce Willingham, owner of the Gazette, has been in the newspaper business a half-century. At a time when local journalism is collapsing, these papers are time capsules and community pillars – chronicling hailstorms and hog farming, rodeos and local officials taking from the till.

Recently, both papers have been in the news themselves. Local officials in Marion, Kansas, raided the Record and Mr. Meyer’s home last Friday, confiscating computers, cellphones, and reporting materials. Mr. Meyer’s mother, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, died hours after the raid. The warrant for the search, since dismissed by state authorities, alleged that the Record had illegally obtained sensitive information about a member of the community.

The Gazette, meanwhile, secretly recorded local officials in the Oklahoma county talking about their desire to hire hit men to kill the newspaper’s staff, which had run repeated exposés on police department morale and malfeasance. The extraordinary story is in The New Yorker. 

According to the World Press Freedom Index, the United States is No. 45 of 180 nations – in the “satisfactory” zone, though dropping. But things feel worse. Violence against the press is growing; trust is declining. 

Historians suggest that violence against the press is not new and corresponds with periods of intense partisanship. As the media landscape fractures from huge corporate entities serving millions to serving niche audiences, news becomes seen less as a fair arbiter and more as partisan itself. 

Where does it stop? State authorities in Oklahoma and Kansas have taken steps to rein in local officials. The Record, for example, will be getting its equipment back. But thousands of miles away in India, a journalist connected with the Monitor has been in jail for more than a year, simply for refusing to toe the government line. In America, two tiny storefront papers on the Great Plains are essential to ensuring the U.S. doesn’t tip into that same darkness.


You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.

Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Taylor Luck
The office of Yasser Arafat, the first president of the Palestinian Authority, is on display at the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah, West Bank, June 21, 2023. Nearby is the office of the late Mr. Arafat's aging successor, Mahmoud Abbas, whose lack of a succession plan is precipitating a leadership crisis.

Palestinians’ trust in their leader and government is failing. Mahmoud Abbas, the aging and autocratic president, has been holding together the Palestinian Authority. But with no succession plan in place, predictions of chaos are proliferating.

Tingshu Wang/Reuters/File
People wearing face masks hold shopping bags as they walk under a giant screen showing news footage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a meeting, at a shopping area in Beijing, July 31, 2020.

U.S.-China ties have been showing modest signs of improving. But sustaining that momentum may test both leaders’ ability to persevere in the face of challenging political and economic dynamics in Beijing.

A brawl in Montgomery, Alabama, this month had clear racial elements. Yet it also said something important about why incivility is rising in the U.S. – and what can be done about it.

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor
Staffers in Fort Moore's Department of Public Works ready new markers for installation, July 25, 2023. To rename the base, the staff remade and replaced hundreds of signs.

Fort Moore in Georgia holds lessons on how to rename military bases once named for Confederates. Asking locals what they thought helped lead to a smooth transition.

Karen Norris/Staff

When readers dive into translated books that are international bestsellers, they get a taste of the wonders and complexities of other cultures. It’s an opportunity to savor books that are popular around the world.


The Monitor's View

Reuters
Shoes symbolising war crimes committed against Ukrainian civilians are placed at the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic, to mark the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Feb.15, 2023.

One of the greatest acts of hospitality in recent history has been Europe’s acceptance of 4 million Ukrainian refugees since Russia’s invasion 18 months ago. While “host fatigue” has emerged in some countries, especially as the war drags on, Russia’s hope that the mass migration would sow divisions in Europe and weaken its support for Ukraine has so far failed.

In fact, one benchmark of success for European backing of Ukraine has been how well the refugees have settled in. The Czech Republic, for example, reported last week that more than half of refugees now pay for their housing, a sign of how many have found jobs. More than 90% of the Ukrainian children attend school. The government is also setting up a center to help refugees deal with the trauma of sexual violence in Ukraine.

Czechia stands out for its hospitality because it ranks highest among European nations in the proportion of Ukrainian refugees to its population, or about 350,000 in a country of 10 million. “The Czech hospitality and welcome of Ukrainian war refugees is a perfect example of European solidarity and kindness,” says Lilyana Pavlova, vice president of the European Investment Bank, which helped finance the country’s settlement program.

While polls show Czechs have lately grumbled that the state is doing more for Ukrainians than for its own citizens, other data indicated how much the generosity has been at the grassroots. One-third of children have directly participated in the help of refugees. “We couldn’t have done it without help from the Czech people,” Minister of the Interior Vít Rakušan told Deutsche Welle. Before the war, the Czech Republic was ranked as the world’s second most welcoming country, based on a 2018 global survey of travelers by Booking.com.

Hospitality, especially when it is selfless rather than for show, is often overlooked in how it can change world events. One expert on the topic, Mona Siddiqui at the University of Edinburgh, says opening one’s home to desperate strangers reveals the “very cell” of an individual. “We must give and be generous because this is how God is, and God’s giving knows no limits,” she wrote in a 2015 book, “Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name.”

Hospitality toward war refugees helps restore their dignity. “The goal of hospitality as an act and as an attitude to life is far more radical; it demands a transformation of the self toward goodness and grace,” wrote Ms. Siddiqui.

Europe’s concrete expressions of love toward Ukraine’s refugees may help end the war. By educating and employing them, Europe is also preparing the refugees to rebuild their country after the war. The front lines of this war are not only in Ukraine. They are in the hearts of people like those in Czechia who open their homes and welcome refugees into their schools.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Each weekday, the Monitor includes one clearly labeled religious article offering spiritual insight on contemporary issues, including the news. The publication – in its various forms – is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences. The Monitor is owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston – whose founder was concerned with both the state of the world and the quality of available news.

As we prayerfully recognize the spiritual truth of our being as God’s children, our experience adjusts harmoniously.


Viewfinder

Willy Kurniawan/Reuters
A participant holds an Indonesian national flag as he celebrates after reaching the top of a greased pole during the Panjat Pinang competition at Ancol Beach in Jakarta, Indonesia, Aug. 17, 2023. Panjat Pinang, a traditional game, is played as part of Indonesia's Independence Day celebrations, with the country marking 78 years since leaders declared independence from the Dutch in 1945. Teams grease the trunks of pinang trees (or poles) and work together to claim prizes at the peak.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

That’s the end of today’s Daily. Thanks for coming along. Tomorrow, our “Why We Wrote This” podcast will look at the phenomenon of microschools. Staff writer Jackie Valley discusses the emerging world of project-based learning, where aspiration is about “building a civil society from scratch.”

More issues

2023
August
17
Thursday

Give us your feedback

We want to hear, did we miss an angle we should have covered? Should we come back to this topic? Or just give us a rating for this story. We want to hear from you.