Whatever the nature of the voyage’s travails, the Cunard Line steamship company had this goal for its transatlantic steamers a century ago: “to keep the ship sweet.” 

Below deck the stokers could be working 100 men to a shift, shoveling coal to keep the boilers primed, but diners above should be able to murmur in conversation and eat from polished silver unawares. Passengers must journey unburdened by the cares of the ship.

WORLD readers (and listeners!) are typically surprised when I tell them that the idea for such a magazine was originally born out of a ministry to children. It’s a story worth retelling.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

I should do a victory dance—and I’m very sad to do it.

When Joel Belz started WORLD in 1986, I was writing a book entitled Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media. He and I did not yet know each other, but we had arrived at the same conclusion: The days of Christians being able to write on the pages of big secular newspapers and magazines were coming to an end.

After a seven-decade career that involved 10,000 hours in front of a camera, newsman Hugh Downs died on Wednesday. He was 99. His two children, Hugh Raymond Downs and Deirdre Lynn Downs, survive him, along with two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

So if the highly regarded Wall Street Journal, in a lengthy and spacious front-page feature, proclaimed to the world that you had utterly failed when you recently took on the hardest challenge of your life—how would you respond?

That’s pretty much what the Journal did in mid-June, I think, when it used a Page 1 headline to declare: “The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.” The subhead on the second page stressed the same point: “Remote Learning Falls Short.”

Earlier this month, the big story in journalism was a staff revolt at The New York Times that led to the ouster of the paper’s opinion editor. His decision to publish an essay from a sitting U.S. senator—about an opinion that 58 percent of registered voters share—prompted the revolt.