The headline quoted above is exactly as it appeared last April 28 on the front page of The Patriot-News, a daily newspaper serving Pennsylvania’s capital of Harrisburg. I happened to be visiting the town that day, otherwise I probably would have missed the story, because the rest of the nation’s news media either ignored it or buried it somewhere in the vicinity of the horoscope column.
A few miles outside Harrisburg sits the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the TMI of the headline. We all know what happened there in 1979. Or do we? The news media portrayed it as a catastrophe of biblical proportion. It seems sacrilegious to point out that nobody was killed or even seriously injured in the TMI accident, and that backup emergency systems finally did kick in to prevent a truly cataclysmic, Chernobyl-type event.