matt: no apology necessary. your point's well-taken. personally, i believe that tragedies like the one in san diego, jonestown, and canada//switzerland is just the price we bear for religious liberty, which is itself grounded on a religious sentiment (we are `endowed by our creator,'' etc.) all the heaven's gate episode tells you is that in all of america, given 25 years to work with, doe could find 30-odd people who would buy this line. attempts to channel people's religious yearnings into a recognized and generally-approved path have not ended happily, from the inquisition to waco. paradoxically, religious liberty seems to keep the casualty rate down. i'll be more careful with the word `cult' in future.
bombardier: because they write to a general interest audience, dailies try (and often fail) to be non-judgemental. if the speaker has obvious trouble completing a sentence, or speaks slander without due caution, or shows any other sign of obvious unbalance, we sometimes ignore them altogether. but we're real shy of calling them loonies except on the editorial page. and only then if they hold public office.
macro: i think your brother hit it on the head. a favorite gripe among the public is that `the media' has an agenda and that we sit around crafting stories with secret sugnals imbedded in the text to brainwash the reader/audience into our point of view. fact is, we're just trying to make deadline. just about anybody who passed high school english can write a news story, given a couple of weeks to rewrite it, look up all the references, pass it around to friends for comment. but you make your living by making deadline. it's all about getting it together, fast.
well, this has been refreshing. for all the media's machinery, we rarely have a forum from which to explain ourselves.
regards...
jlewis