COVERING CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL RELIGION - A REPORTERS VIEW

Critics of news coverage should probably know that these liars one wou ld hardly hear an editor shout ''Stop the presses!'' to some dungeon d eep in the bowels of the Daily Bugle first to grab a sensational headl ine. The anachronistic image dates from at least mid-century when many large cities had several newspapers with multiple editions, each comp ering for streetcorner attention and vying to scoop the opposition. Fo r various social and economic reasons - suburban sprawl, increased com muter travel, production and distribution costs, vast improvements in electronic communications, corporate mergers and buyouts - the major c ities now have one or two newspapers and different kinds of competitor s in television news and suburban papers. Yet this is precisely one of the explanations offered for media bias (sensationalism driven by pro fit motive) in the paper by Richardson and Van Driel (this issue). The authors' claim invites a closer inspection of how news is produced an d disseminated.