On July 24, The New York Times ran a piece by Carol Pogash entitled "Berkeley Offers Safety Guidance On Carrying Phones." It left little to the imagination regarding where The Times stands (and has always stood) regarding the potential threat to health caused by the microwave radiation emitted by cell phones. The first paragraph read as follows:
Leave it to Berkeley: This city, which has led the nation in passing all manner of laws favored by the left, has done it again. This time, the city passed a measure -- not actually backed by science -- requiring cellphone stores to warn customers that the products could be hazardous to their health, presumably by emitting dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation.
No, leave it to The New York Times to once again publish an article exonerating microwave radiation from causing harm without citing a single one of the dozens of studies published in the peer-reviewed medical literature, which demonstrate that cell phone radiation can cause brain cancer and inner ear tumors in heavy cell-phone users.
Leave it to The New York Times to fail to interview a single one of the dozens of scientists worldwide who have conducted and published such studies, but to quote a lawyer representing the cellular telephone industry as declaring that the Berkeley ordinance ordinance is "alarmist" and "violates the most fundamental principles of the First Amendment."
Leave it to The New York Times to assure its readers that the cell phone industry is not allowing insinuations against its products to go unchallenged, and that the industry is filing a lawsuit against Berkeley, "charging that retailers cannot be forced to say something that is 'false.'"
Leave it to The New York Times to issue the warning that..."Berkeley has a habit of passing first-in-the-nation laws that seem radical but are promptly copied by other municipalities, including creating smoking bans, a sanctuary for immigrants in the country illegally, a Styrofoam ban and health benefits for domestic workers."
And, finally, the most egregious omission of all, leave it to The New York Times to publish such a slanted piece without acknowledging the fact that on May 31, 2011, two of the newspapers own reporters, Tara Parker-Pope and Felicity Barringer, posted a three-page article on the paper's website entitled "Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says." Their article described the findings of 31 scientists convened by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, which was chaired by Dr. Jonathan M. Samet, a physician and and epidemiologist, who was a member of President Obama's National Cancer Advisory Board. Parker-Pope and Barringer quoted Dr. Samet as declaring that "the panel's decision to classify cellphones as 'possibly carcinogenic' was based largely on epidemiological data showing an increased risk among heavy cellphone users of a rare type of [brain] tumor called a glioma."