GELFAND’S WORLD-Channel 2 was back to its old ways the other night, peddling pseudoscientific nonsense under the pretense of running a news story. "Is WiFi worth the risk?" -- that was the headline presented to the viewing audience. The inference you might make from this headline is that there is some risk associated with WiF i. The KCBS story went on to implicate the kind of radio waves emitted by WiFi transmitters, cell phones, and iPads. The problem is that some people actually take this seriously, and claim to be sickened by something as benign as the new breed of electrical smart meters. Channel 2 found one of those people and ran her story.
The interesting part is that there is a real news story hiding under this nonsense, but Channel 2 missed it and went for the fake. Let's consider.
The woman in question is a school teacher who began to get symptoms such as headaches a while back. She noticed that the Department of Water and Power had recently changed her family's electric meter, replacing the old one with a new "smart" meter. It's the kind that reports electric usage from time to time using radio waves. She asked that the new meter be replaced with an old style meter, and her symptoms got better.
Then her symptoms came back, and this time they were associated with the installation of a WiFi system in her classroom. She spoke to the school board, as the news story shows, and ultimately, the school district removed the WiFi system from her classroom.
It seems to me that this is the real core of the story, namely that the L.A. Unified School District found itself in a situation where it was simply easier to give in than to fight. The district is making an accommodation to a fairly vague set of symptoms that may have some organic elements, or may have some psychological elements, but almost certainly are not the result of low power radio waves at the level of a WiFi hub. So the decision that came down was to avoid legal hassles, but at the expense of the school children's ability to make use of WiFi enabled tools.
KCBS played this as if it were a straight story, going so far as to find an MD who was willing to talk on camera. To his credit, the doctor didn't make a definitive statement about the woman's ailments, and stated that the question of electromagnetic hypersensitivity is not established. What he didn't say, though, is that electromagnetic hypersensitivity is an extremely unlikely explanation for any human ailment.
And that's where this news story went off the rails. It was presented in a way that is a little analogous to the stories in which two experts are presented, one testifying that there is global warming, and the other that there is not, without regard to the fact that for every global warming denialist, there are another hundred non-denialists.
This is the news style that has come to be called false balance, and is gradually being replaced, at least by responsible news outlets, with a more careful approach to what legitimate science and medicine have to say.
But it gets worse. In Tuesday night's WiFi story, KCBS didn't even rise to the level of false balance. Where was the other doctor (or a thousand doctors) to point out that this whole story was nonsense, and that there is plenty of evidence collected from careful studies to show that electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a non-explanation used by some people to explain away other sorts of ailments that may have real explanations, including the psychogenic?
The KCBS story did go so far as to include a brief interview with an LAUSD safety expert, who showed how electromagnetic field strength can be measured, and showed charts from actual field measurements taken in a classroom full of kids. He is heard to say, "Look how low that is," but the news story just drops him at this point.
What could they have done better? If they wanted to present this story in a journalistically defensible way, they had an obligation to present the other 99.999% of the story. This would include expert testimony that radio waves are not making people sick, and that there are studies to support this conclusion. It would have included an explanation by the safety expert of what it means to measure radio wave intensities in the fractions of microwatts. In short, it would have included some reality along with the tripe.
There was some interest in this syndrome in the UK a few years back, and scientists decided to test whether it might have some validity. One way to do this is to create a controlled environment in which radio waves can't get in from the outside. Think of a building that is constructed as if it were wearing its own tinfoil hat. You would build it in some place that is distant from powerful transmitters, and you would use copper wire shielding instead of tinfoil.
Then you would install radio devices so that your test subjects wouldn't know when they were turned on or when they were turned off.
As you might surmise from this introduction, the results were not all that surprising, in that the subjects would get symptoms when the radio was turned off or when it was turned on, depending on whether they thought the radio transmitter was actually transmitting. They could be fooled into having symptoms in the complete absence of radio transmissions.
There is a word for this kind of response to a test stimulus. It is the opposite of the well known placebo effect, where people feel better in response to a perceived treatment, even if it is just a sugar pill.
Since it is the opposite of placebo, the effect is called nocebo. Maybe nocebo is a bit of a strain etymologically, but it makes the point.
If CBS television wanted to titillate its viewers with a story like this, they could at least have spooned in a little real life science. It wouldn't have had to be all that much, just a morsel.
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Put it this way. News is supposed to be, at the very least, about telling the truth. We all know that it needs to be entertaining to bring in the advertising dollars, but there should be a bar against being deliberately misleading. That's not a very high bar, but it needs to be there.
By the way, this particular newscast began with an extensive run of crime and injury stories. I don't object to that per se. It's one way to fill the entertainment quota. But we have every right to expect honesty and accuracy on the crime stories. We should have the same right to expect an honest take on a medical story.
Let's finish by going back to the beginning, and how this segment led off with the spoken lead: "Only on 2: Woman cuts family off from WiFi over health concerns."
We learn that the school teacher has enforced a no-WiFi life in her family home. What's funny is that they do have computer internet access. They just do it using cords instead of a WiFi router. But the kids don't use mobile devices like iPads or cell phones at home. The narrator explains with some glee that the children have a globe instead of using Google Earth. The story also explains that the children listen to tape cassettes instead of using internet devices.
It doesn't sound like a seriously hard lifestyle for the kids, but it ignores the pathology that blames headaches and the like on a nonexistent cause. We got the clown show dressed up in serious clothing, and the real news story buried under pseudoscience. This may have been reporting, but it wasn't journalism.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
