We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest.
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. That one video might be set in a studio with manipulated images also raises credibility issues with the second video.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: “It almost appears that there’s a fan coming in one direction,” Ms. She also noted that while the wind in the video seemed to make Yukawa’s shirt flutter, Goto’s shirt remained relatively still. Under bright sunlight, the shadows would fall in the same direction. The men’s shadows, for instance, converged with one another, suggesting more than one light source, she told Reuters. Veryan Khan, editorial director for the Florida-based Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, analyzed Tuesday’s video frame by frame and found a number of inconsistencies. In exchange for the men’s lives, ISIS demanded a $200 million ransom from the Japanese government by Friday. The two men were filmed kneeling on the ground on either side of a masked man in what appears to be an outdoor desert setting – also the same as in past videos. The first video, posted Tuesday, showed Goto and Yukawa in the familiar orange jumpsuits of previous ISIS hostages. In both cases, questions have been raised about their authenticity.
Saturday's video is the second purportedly released by ISIS this week.