A year is no time. And it is forever.
And it was a year ago that Freedom began a new chapter in its 47-year history as an investigative journal and the voice of the Church of Scientology. The magazine was recast as a regular monthly, to spearhead the Church’s efforts to greatly expand, and enrich, its media footprint. The Church also partnered its own team of writers, editors and designers with veteran professionals in the field, toward creating the “ideal” media voice for the 21st Century.
With Freedom, the Scientology religion speaks through journalism—to its own growing membership, and a broader audience. Topics that reflect the Church’s ideals and its mission are presented in a way that informs and engages a diverse readership. We dig into important social issues that mainstream media tend to avoid, or gloss over.
Freedom, like Scientology, is solution-focused, so we bring you stories about the help the Church extends to every part of the world with its humanitarian programs, which include The Truth about Drugs, United for Human Rights, The Way to Happiness, and its Volunteer Ministers.
We also shine a light where things have rotted at their core—government incursion on civil liberties, and the psychiatric industry peddling influence and pushing dangerous drugs for profit in places where it has no business, like the military, the foster care system and in schools.
Freedom also brought you the world—taking you to cities as diverse as Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Basel, Switzerland; London and Tel Aviv—places where beautiful new Scientology Ideal Churches are bringing hope to people, and help toward positive societal change. Our stories chronicled human rights activism in Colombia,the struggle of women in Nepal and the problem of synthetic drug abuse in Japan.
In Los Angeles, where Freedom is headquartered, we covered the innovative Church of Scientology International Dissemination and Distribution Center, where ingenuity and gumption come together to produce and supply the materials that support the Church’s good works around the world. And we were there for the opening of the Ideal Pacifica Bridge—three Scientology Churches on L. Ron Hubbard Way, a street named for the religion’s Founder in the City of Angels.
In our first anniversary issue, our cover story exposes the sins perpetrated against America’s military personnel—women and men who survived the battlefield only to be felled by psychopharmaceuticals. Those harmful—sometimes deadly—chemicals were paid for by you, the taxpayer.
Media & Ethics this month is on a related theme: how greenmail by the pharmaceutical industry has muted most media voices that would report the links between mind-altering drugs and the spate of mass murders in recent times.
Freedom also talked with Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, on freedom of belief and the intersection of religion and art. And on the other side of the world, we visited Bogotá, Colombia, where a new Scientology Ideal Church is the emblem of the trenchant efforts by Scientologists—successful, according to top leaders in that country—to stem the drug-fueled bloodshed.
Also in August, we offer new perspective on the heated debate around nuclear stockpiling. No, it’s not Iran or North Korea, but the United States that’s ramping up a new arms race.
As to the future—well, the possibilities are limitless. Later this year, we’ll move to new offices at Scientology Media Productions in Hollywood, where we’ll align our efforts, and the new Freedom bureaus currently forming around the world, with a broadcast division, to transmit the voice of the Church of Scientology loud and clear and to every nation. The media landscape is about to have more signal and less noise.
To get your message through, please write. As ever, Freedom welcomes your views, comments and letters.
—Jennifer Lankheim
Editor
