t if Jack disagreed with the figure provided that there would be precious little he could do to rectify the problem. In the view of Laura Barrett, in her article "How the dead speak to the living: intertextuality and the postmodern sublime in White Noise", the world represented in DeLillo's work is one "in which individuality is replaced by media role models and God is replaced by an ATM" (99). What could be more fitting than the ATM's authority being compared to that of God? This is Jack's world: a world in which the word of the media is taken as all-powerful. The ATM is yet another authority, dispensing its answer via computer medium providing instant and unquestionable validity. Consider the spectacle of the man carrying the television above his head and proclaiming, in regards to the "airborne toxic event" that "there's nothing on the network, not a word, not a picture" (161). I realize that the man is questioning why this event does not warrant coverage, yet there is a subtle message underlying this passage. If the network is not showing footage, did it truly happen? I read this subtext in light of other lines in the work that seem to point to the media being an unquestionable source, such as the exchange between Jack and Heinrich beginning when Heinrich states: "it's going to rain tonight", to which Jack replies "it's raining right now" with Heinrich responding that "the radio said tonight" (22). The exchange then expands into a discussion about temporal reality, yet young Heinrich was willing to accept the radio's authority that it would rain tonight period, despite Jack's having pointed out that it was currently raining. This supports the contention that media is the true authority and should be believed above all else, even what one sees with one's own eyes. This lends credence to my description of this ...