For two years, reporters from the nation's top newspapers flooded into the city of Vista, California, after fundamentalists took over the local school board in November 1992. They came in search of the religious right. And they got a lot wrong.

Some of the errors were harmless, such as the lead of a Chicago Tribune story last November that described Vista as being "nestled high in a southern California mountainside" -- news to Vista residents, who are ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean and only 450 feet above sea level.

But other errors were anything but innocuous. "They blew up things larger than reality," said a former school board president, John Tyndall. "The national media helped fuel a perception that things were happening that weren't." Indeed, reporters didn't do their homework, sometimes blindly relying on their sources and on each other's stories. And the resulting errors invariably made the board appear more Bible-thumping and meanspirited than it actually was.

In August 1993, for example, the board approved a policy encouraging -- but not ordering -- teachers to challenge existing scientific theories. While the board clearly wanted to weaken the theory of evolution, the policy was largely symbolic and actually required nothing new of teachers.

But in a page-one story, the Los Angeles Times reported that the board had ordered teachers to discuss creationism. The story relied upon wording from the draft version of the policy, which did issue orders to teachers. But the board had ultimately rewritten the draft, taking out the mandate. The New York Times made the same mistake on the same day, and the Chicago Tribune soon followed suit.

Although a phone call to the school district to get the correct wording of the policy would have prevented the error, The Associated Press reported days later that the board had told teachers to teach the story of Genesis "as an alternative theory to evolution."

Eight months later, the Los Angeles Times expanded the myth, reporting that the board had lowered evolution to the status of "just another theory" and that it had required discussion of divine creation in science class. Neither assertion was true.

Another myth began last March, when the Times quoted a critic of the board who said it had rejected a school breakfast program because "children not eating breakfast with parents tends to corrupt family values." In fact, the board had never debated school breakfasts or whether children should eat at home. (However, after the Times story appeared, the board did reject a federal lunch program to feed children during school vacations. Board members argued that the program was a waste of taxpayers' money.)

As the false story spread, the attribution to the critic, who had been wrong in the first place, disappeared, and the tale of the anti-breakfast school board became fact. Months later, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune both reported that the board had taken an ax to school breakfasts, with the Tribune even repeating the untruth that the board had done so because it wanted children to eat at home. This story even made its way into American Civil Liberties Union fund-raising literature, in a letter blasting the board's alleged aversion to school breakfasts, among other things.

There were other errors.

The Los Angeles Times, quoting the same anti-board activist, reported that the board had eliminated free busing for poor children, when the board actually only trimmed it. The New York Times said the board tried to "reintroduce prayer to the school system." In fact, the board never discussed school prayer (although it did begin holding voluntary invocations before board meetings).

There was a lot of news to be found in Vista: residents were engaged in cultural warfare over everything from sex education to illegal immigration. And not all reporting was bad. The local papers often got the story right; The Washington Post correctly reported that the board's new science policy was largely symbolic; The New York Times did correct its school breakfast and school prayer errors, three weeks after they appeared.

Fundamentalist Christians in Vista say biased reporters contributed to their defeat in the November election, when they lost control of the board. That's debatable. But there is no doubt that chances for a debate on the real issues were diminished.

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