IF A homeless man dies on a cold night beneath a bridge, that's not news, Pope Francis said recently. It just seems normal. Yet, on the other hand, a big drop on the stock exchange commands the front pages. "If someone dies, that isn't news, but a ten-point drop in the markets is a tragedy," he said. "Thus people are discarded, as if they were garbage."

To see ourselves as others see us is always a sobering experience. But it is all too easy for journalists to pause for a while at such reflections, and then return to the reality of an everyday life, underpinned by a raft of unchallenged assumptions. Last week, I was invited to speak at the University of Chester, where a new MA course in Theology, Media and Communications is being launched in the next academic year to unpick some of those unarticulated assumptions. It is an exciting and much overdue enterprise.

Bursts of indignation, such as the one to which the new Pope gave vent earlier this month, are well and good. But to go beyond this needs something more sustained, such as the programme that Professor Elaine Graham is putting together in Chester. Her course is seeking to encourage a more systematic theological reflection on the place of the media in religious life.

At the open day last week, the putative students were mainly religious professionals seeking to foster greater media literacy within Churches and faith-based organisations. I spoke to them about the contrast between news values - which centre, even in serious newspapers, around events, novelty, conflict, power, individuals, celebrity, scandal, titillation, and self-interest - and gospel values such as compassion, justice, self-sacrifice, fidelity, perseverance, community, forgiveness, and solidarity. The disparity perhaps explains why the media hold up such a distorted mirror to daily life. The dynamics and trajectories of news also play a part.

But, as those considering the course came back with a range of questions and experiences, I began to wonder whether it is the journalists who should really be on such a course. The media have a tendency to regard religion and its institutions as so much more raw material to stuff into their templates of what constitutes news. The Church is as useful a forum for stories about rows, splits, backbiting, and manoeuvring as are the NHS, the intelligence services, or politics. But there is little reflection in the nation's frantic newsrooms about the nature of the mirror that the media claims to hold, the selectivity of its silvering, or the various implied ideologies from which its frame is constructed.

The internet only exacerbates this fragmented selectivity. And the commercial pressures created by falling circulations, as the internet grows and paid-for journalism is increasingly squeezed, are creating a downward spiral of sense-burst infotainment, which gives journalists even less time for philosophical reflection on what is keeping them so busy.

There is no hierarchy of truth in news, and most news editors are theologically illiterate, as coverage of stories such as "The Pope says atheists can go to heaven" shows. A course such as the one in Chester, which helps the Church to understand the media, is a good thing. But even better would be a mechanism that would force editors to consider some of the issues that Professor Graham and her colleagues will be exploring. Don't hold your breath. Newspaper editors, as T. S. Eliot might have said, cannot bear very much reality.

Paul Vallely is finishing a biography, Pope Francis: Untying the knots, to be published by Bloomsbury next month.