The Columbia Journalism Review plays darts every issue with unworthy journalists, but its Darts & Laurels feature for May and June threw one at the entire “U.S. news media.” Launching a dubious metaphor, CJR took the American media to task “for failing to pick up a long-distance signal.”
“There is a vast conspiracy among the press, especially newspapers, not to write about the biological studies, especially the epidemiological studies done in Europe,” Brodeur told me this week. Like other vast conspiracies, this one shows every sign of being able to live on indefinitely, never confirmed beyond doubt or discredited to everyone’s satisfaction. That a long period of latency precedes whatever damage cell phones might do only hardens both sides’ convictions.
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He couldn’t be sure, “but some of the early returns are disquieting.” Citing studies that other reporters took comfort in, Slesin said they “point to a problem over the long term. These studies show that using a cell phone for more than ten years leads to higher rates of two different kinds of tumors: gliomas, a type of brain tumor, and acoustic neuromas, a tumor of the nerve that connects the ear to the brain. In each case, the tumors were more likely to be on the side of the head closest to the phone.”
When I looked harder I began to find studies that backed Slesin up. For instance, “Tumour risk associated with use of cellular telephones or cordless desktop telephones” appeared in the World Journal of Surgical Oncology in October 2006. And in January of that year, “Cellular Phones, Cordless Phones, and the Risks of Glioma and Meningioma” ran in the American Journal of Epidemiology, where it was reported that “among long-term cellular phone users [ten years or more] a twofold risk of glioma was observed.”
Gloria Cooper, who writes Darts & Laurels for CJR, didn’t know about Hughlett’s story until I told her, and then she was embarrassed. “We did the best search we could possibly do,” she said, wondering aloud if she should run a correction. She asked what Hughlett had said to me about her CJR item, but the obliviousness was mutual. Hughlett hadn’t known it existed.
