For the most part, they do, Kimbrough says: "I think reporters strive to be very accurate, and I've found that most of them are easy to work with in making sure they get it right, either with a correction or another story that's got the correct information." Unfortunately, this process takes time, and the lag makes "Setting the Record Straight" necessary. "Otherwise," she says, "we'd run the risk of a story with bad information in it traveling around the world before people realize that it's wrong."
Frequency check: A cancer-rate study of people who live near an antenna farm on Lookout Mountain arrived on July 22, and, as with an earlier survey, its findings can be perceived in diametrically opposing ways. A press release from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which oversaw the research, emphasizes that "there is no conclusive evidence of any linkage of adverse health effects among Lookout Mountain residents to the high-powered broadcast antennas and transmitter towers located in the area west of Denver." In contrast, a release from the City of Golden, which was a party in a 2003 lawsuit filed against the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners to stop the erection of a new tower, proclaimed that the report "shows increased levels of brain and central nervous system cancers in residents living adjacent to broadcast towers on Lookout Mountain."
Mark Manger
For the record: Denver DA spokeswoman Lynn
Kimbrough.
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Neither take is totally off base. As in the 1999 study that this inquiry updates, the health department detected elevated cancer rates in two areas near the towers. Even so, the variety of ailments was such that technicians couldn't say with certainty that the illnesses were caused by radio frequency (RF) exposure. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, something's happening there, but they don't know what it is.
Opponents in the debate over whether a new tower should be built are due to face off again during an August 12 hearing before Jeffco commissioners. (The same officials who rejected construction in 1999 approved it four years later -- something that was misstated in this space last week.) That helps explain the divergent reactions to the recent study's results. Former Channel 4 head honcho Marv Rockford, who serves as spokesman for a consortium of broadcasters dubbed the Lake Cedar Group, released a statement focusing on the absence of a causal link and referring to the report as "a useful and reassuring contribution to the discussion of RF and health." Meanwhile, Deb Carney, an attorney for Canyon Area Residents for the Environment, a homeowners' collective that has spent years fighting the tower, sees the statistics as "another red flag of warning.
"If you go back and read old tobacco studies, you'd see one after another saying, 'There's an elevated rate of lung cancer, but we can't say smoking causes it,'" she says. "That's how science works. They wait until they have absolute proof until they say something. But that's not the way we should decide public-policy health questions."
Clearly, Rockford and Carney share little common ground. Even cancer can't bring them together.
Quiet zone: On July 27, in a move that surprised absolutely no one, Tim Brown, the CEO of NRC Broadcasting, put out a press release declaring that KNRC, a news-talk outlet at 1150 AM, would immediately pull the plug, and he wasn't joking. The signal vanished after 10 a.m., smack-dab in the middle of Bill O'Reilly's show. Talk about stopping the spin.
Brown's announcement ended a two-year odyssey that began with high hopes and ended in flames. Only weeks after KNRC launched, in July 2002, Brown acknowledged that news talk is an expensive format and predicted that it would take "three to five years to get to where we want to be." Since Brown is the son-in-law of lucre magnet Phil Anschutz, the station seemed likelier than most to receive such a grace period. Unfortunately, KNRC never generated decent numbers with its original approach. Left-leaning hosts Greg Dobbs, who left the station in part over health concerns, and Enid Goldstein subsequently ceded their shifts to conservative yakkers Doug Kellett and Jimmy Lakey. The moves pissed off most of the station's small audience and failed to attract a new one, since KNRC became all but indistinguishable from the rest of the conservative operations on the dial.
Hours after the shutdown, Brown was in a state of shock. "We had full boards all the time and our promotions were always well attended, but it never showed up in Arbitron diaries," he said. Competition didn't help matters; as he put it, "everyone and his dog has a news-talk or sports station on the AM dial."
Beginning on July 30, a music format Brown's keeping under wraps for now makes its bow at 1150 AM, but it may not be heard for long, since the station is currently on the market. Until then, the silence speaks volumes.
