Online early on 27 May, too late for that day's newspaper, the Wall Street Journal posted the article "Cellphone-cancer link found in government study: Multiyear, peer-reviewed study found 'low incidences' of two types of tumors in male rats exposed to type of radio frequencies commonly emitted by cellphones."
Whatever the actual biophysical realities, news editors and reporters like to run stories about possible cell-phone dangers. By midmorning, the story had begun to spread—often with the effect of unnecessarily spreading outright alarm.
A few news reports, grounded in the wider scientific literature, have questioned the hype. Recently, a widely publicized, three-decade-long Australian study, reported in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, exemplified that extensive literature. It declared, "We found no increase in brain cancer incidence compatible with the steep increase in mobile phone use."
Most reports have sought a moderate balance between that well-established understanding and this new rat-tumor news. But a question arises about that balance: Is it a false equivalence? That is, does it represent the journalistic practice of conferring a factually unmerited appearance of balance? That's what would happen if a reporter presented anti-vaccine protesters' view as a possibly legitimate alternative to settled vaccine science. As this overall cell-phone story develops, you can see the journalism profession wrestling with the false-equivalence question.
The WSJ's article opened by calling the headlined finding "explosive ... in the long-running debate about whether mobile phones cause health effects." It reported that the tumors seen in the $25 million National Toxicology Program (NTP) study were gliomas, found in the glial cells of the brain, and schwannomas of the heart. Early on, it quoted former program leader Ron Melnick: "Where people were saying there's no risk, I think this ends that." Microwave News, which had posted an extensive but apparently little-noticed article two days earlier, reported that Melnick led the team that designed the study.
Two days earlier still, the WSJ had telegraphed a predisposition to promote cell-phone worry. In a special section with pro and con commentaries on what it called "crucial technology issues," the WSJ introduced one of seven point–counterpoint exchanges—this one headlined "Should cellphones have warning labels?"—in part by asserting that "many studies ... suggest there are links to risks of cancer or other ill effects."
A 27 May sidebar to the WSJ's report about the NTP rat-tumor study borrowed the main article's phrase "explosive finding" and advised, "If you want to limit your exposure to energy from cellphones, use a headset or the speaker while talking on the phone, and don't keep the device flat against your body, such as in a pants pocket." That sort of advice has appeared widely in the media.
Whatever the actual biophysical realities, electromagnetic fields have stimulated decades of health concerns. Some journalists' urge to encourage cell-phone worry isn't new either. An earlier media report in the present venue began this way:
At a low but persistent level, the media have continued stoking public worries over alleged health dangers from nonionizing low-level cell phone RF radiation. On 2 January, no less than the New York Times contributed with a business-section, front-page, above-the-fold report on cell phone policy confusion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Does the CDC counsel caution against cell phone RF or not?
A question for journalists now is whether that stoking is about to accelerate. In one of the 27 May stories that followed the WSJ's article, Consumer Reports predicted that the results of the NTP study "could dramatically shift the national debate over cell phone safety."
Some journalists want to see any such acceleration restrained. Consider the scolding that Forbes.com science and medicine correspondent Matthew Herper leveled at the publication Mother Jones for promoting cell-phone-cancer "dread." Herper added, "You too, Wall Street Journal."
He could also add some scolding for McClatchyDC, part of the McClatchy news network, where an article began by echoing Mother Jones: "It's the news everyone has been dreading: That little cell phone that people use all the time could cause cancer." Online, McClatchy appended a brief video clip titled "How bad is radiation, really?"
Cell-phone radiation is nonionizing. The clip is about ionizing radiation.
Concerning the new study, Herper wrote, "Experts say the result may not be true, and even if it is, that the types of cancer involved are so rare that a person's overall increase in risk would be negligible." One of the experts he consulted is Michael S. Lauer, NIH's deputy director for extramural research. In a peer-review write-up appended to the scientific report itself, Lauer declared, "I suspect that this experiment is substantially underpowered and that the few positive results found reflect false positive findings." Lauer added emphasis with a contextualizing footnote citing John P. A. Ioannidis's much-discussed 2005 paper "Why most published research findings are false."
In a follow-up posting headlined "Yesterday's cell-phone cancer scare scares me a little about the future of journalism," Herper summarized his overall science-and-the-media criticism for this incident: "Readers were told why they should be scared before they found out the reasons they should calm down."
The study itself carries the title "Report of Partial Findings from the National Toxicology Program Carcinogenesis Studies of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Radiation in Hsd: Sprague Dawley® SD rats (Whole Body Exposures)." It emphasizes:
The review of partial study data in this report has been prompted by several factors. Given the widespread global usage of mobile communications among users of all ages, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure to RFR [radiofrequency radiation] could have broad implications for public health. There is a high level of public and media interest regarding the safety of cell phone RFR and the specific results of these NTP studies.
It also stipulates:
It is important to note that this document reviews only the findings from the brain and heart and is not a complete report of all findings from the NTP's studies. Additional data from these studies ... are currently under evaluation and will be reported together with the current findings in two forthcoming NTP Technical Reports.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced five years ago that the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer had classified mobile-phone use and other RF electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic. However, NCI also called it "noteworthy that brain cancer incidence and mortality rates in the population have changed little in the past decade." NCI emphasized that more research was needed, and in fact specifically addressed the NTP effort being reported on now:
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is leading the largest laboratory rodent study to date on cell phone radiofrequency exposures. The NTP studies will assess the potential for health hazards from exposure to cell phone radiation. The studies are designed to mimic human exposure and are based on the frequencies and modulations currently in use in the United States.
A few media outlets have joined Forbes.com's Herper in opposing cell-phone alarm. And at WebMD, a write-up appeared under the headline "Experts question study linking cellphones, cancer: Rodents exposed to phone radiation actually lived longer than unexposed animals, reviewers point out."
In a few cases, voices were figuratively raised in headlines:
* At Vox: "Seriously, stop with the irresponsible reporting on cellphones and cancer."
* At Fortune: "That cell-phone cancer study isn't quite as scary as it seems: Its findings are less compelling, and more confusing, than the headlines suggest."
* At New York Magazine: "For the love of God, please chill out about that new study about rats and cell phones and cancer."
New York declared, "This sort of unnecessary panic is what happens in the age of hypercompetitive social-media science journalism, and it sucks." The article observed:
[S]cience isn't a buffet: You can't wander around a given study's statistically significant findings, scooping only those which tell a compelling story onto your plate (rich mac and cheese) while ignoring those which complicate things or point in the opposite direction (brussels sprouts)."
You can't, or you shouldn't? Note that even two highly respected technoscience magazines published predictions calling to mind such a buffet.
A piece at IEEE Spectrum ends by quoting Kenneth R. Foster, a bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania: "This is going to change the rhetoric in the field. People can point to much more hard evidence that [cellphone RF exposure] really is a problem."
And an article at Scientific American, reprinted online by PBS, ended by quoting Jerry Phillips, a biochemist and director of the Science/Health Science Learning Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He said you "have to realize that this issue opens up a much bigger can of worms than cell phones. If this radiation, this form of energy can interact with biological tissue then it's going to reopen a lot of what were supposedly settled issues regarding the safety of wireless communications. If we're going to be bathed in a whole new electromagnetic environment, how safe is it?"
For many years, Robert Park—University of Maryland physicist, technoscience observer, and author—electronically distributed his weekly single-page What's New. Often he would include a pithy blurb attacking cell-phone worry on grounds of the nonionizing nature of the radiation. But it now appears that Consumer Reports is right: Cell-phone worry will be rising as a media topic—whatever the actual biophysical realities.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
