Posts Tagged ‘cell phones’

A Badly Flawed NYT Story Trumpets Cell Phone Health Dangers

[UPDATE: See media reaction at bottom of this post. Also, be sure to read the correction at end of the NYT article and the response from the NYT public editor.] I’m racing to meet a deadline, but this story in the New York Times is so dismaying I had to take a few minutes to call attention to…Continue Reading…

Exploiting the Precautionary Principle

There are a couple of ways to interpret the story about a revoked ordinance in San Francisco that, as Reuters reports, would have been the first in the United States to require [cell phone] retailers to warn consumers about potentially dangerous radiation levels. Before it was reversed it was known as–get ready for it–the “right…Continue Reading…

Annals of Amplification in Journalism

In recent years, we’ve seen episodic waves of hysteria over reports of brain tumors and other cancers allegedly caused by cell phones and WiFi. If I had to trace this legacy of electromagnetic fear back in time, I would credit a 1979 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology and a series of  articles in the New Yorker (under…Continue Reading…