If you hear it from Tom Brokaw, is it real?

In the Jan. 10 New Yorker, Kentucky writer Bobby Ann Mason describes a real-life nightmare in nearby Paducah. At a factory which came to town just after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paducah's citizens have been working about in a radioactive atmosphere for more than 50 years.

Even more shocking is the local people's lukewarm reaction to the news, announced last August in The Washington Post. For decades, the plant's employees have carried home a green uranium dust so pervasive that it stains their bedsheets. One worker developed "weird toenail-like growths coming out of his elbows and kneecaps," but people only joked about it. A woman articulates a widespread attitude: "I guess I was exposed. But don't worry. If you got it, you got it, and there is nothing that can be done -- but maybe it can for the next generation." (Not likely, says Mason, as uranium's half-life is 24,000 years -- "longer than civilization has existed.") Pressed by Mason to explain the town's cool reaction, a local librarian said that her fellow citizens "took the risk for the jobs," and that the harsh truth hasn't really sunk in yet.

What would make it sink in? Mason asked.

Here is the librarian's response, which fascinates me:

"They're waiting for somebody big to come to town -- Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Tom Brokaw. If Tom Brokaw came, then it would be real."

It's a funny fact of our culture that we sometimes criticize the media harshly but we also look to them to validate our suspicions and fears. If I don't see that car wreck on the 11 o'clock news, maybe it didn't really happen. If I haven't heard a reporter say that too much red meat is bad for my heart, I'll just go right on eating red meat. How could there be a major fire in Roanoke if it isn't on the news? Remember why little Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to her local newspaper in 1897 to ask if Santa Claus existed? Because her father told her, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so."

Of course, most of us know better than to believe everything we hear or see in the media. You've probably seen that classic Chicago Daily News headline "Dewey Defeats Truman," a headline -- and a story -- written by a newspaper staff that went to bed too early. Reporters misunderstand sources or fail to confirm them, and sometimes journalists' enthusiasm over a big story overwhelms their better judgment. For all these reasons, we know that what we see on newsprint and hear from the airwaves is something different from the absolute truth.

The media do play a critical role in shaping truth, however. Without newspapers and magazines, television and radio broadcasts, and the Internet, how could we judge whether O.J. Simpson really killed his wife, what happened between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, or whether there are human rights abuses in Bosnia? By giving us information, the media provide a starting point for us to figure out what is true.

The Paducah case makes clear the enormous responsibility the media have to pursue the truth scrupulously. If we are depending on them to help us know what is "real," then the media must be dependable.

But there's a more interesting lesson to be learned from the peril in Paducah. I read Mason's New Yorker essay and accepted, without question, that the danger she describes is real. I doubt that the folks in Paducah will be so accepting, however, despite the fact that Mason is a local and that she does all she can to rescue the Paducah-ites' reputation (they're neighborly, forgiving folks, she says). Sometimes, the closer we are to the truth, the less likely we are to believe it. When 14-year-old Michael Carneal shot into a prayer group at Paducah's Heath High School in 1997, it was undoubtedly much easier for ME to believe than it was for those who know Carneal and his victims.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that in Paducah, the Washington Post story wasn't enough to make the threat of the Gaseous Diffusion Plant real. The Paducah-ites want a trusted face to tell them whether to believe the threat or not. They want Tom Brokaw. As early as Aristotle started formulating precepts for making arguments, Authority has been one of the most persuasive strategies. Give us a person we trust, and we're listening.

During the fall, Energy Secretary Richardson did go to Paducah. Still, the general reaction was, in Mason's words, "passive." I'd like to think Mason's essay might be a wake-up call, but I doubt many people there read The New Yorker. Perhaps the fact that the writer is a local will carry some weight. But I suspect that a real heavyweight will be needed. If Tom Brokaw isn't available, maybe Walter Cronkite can be persuaded to come out of retirement for a brief appearance in Paducah.

Let's just hope he hasn't been reading the papers.