Journalists with Attitude: A Response to Richardson and Van Driel

Abstract

Deviant religion has notfared very well at the hands of the news media, despite the best efforts of academic students of new religious movements (NRMs) to foster a better understanding of it. Having recently returned to the groves of academe after toiling for a decade in the vineyard of a major metropolitan newspaper, Ifeel the scholars' pain. But I also am convinced that they lack an adequate grasp of how journalists operate, and therefore of why coverage of deviant religion tends to take the form it does. So let me offer a few comments on Richardson and van Driel's article from the standpoint of a participant-observer of the culture ofjournalism a traditionalist culture that, like other traditionalist cultures, resists the advances of outsiders unfamiliar with its ways and means.