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Legitimacy Is Not the Same as Truth — a Note On Journalism
On the press, the official record, and the difference between certified narratives and the actual truth
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Something a little different. A little meta. Less biophysics, more epistemology — how I came to think about journalism the way I do, and why it matters.
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I was not a journalist when I broke the story about the electrical substation adjacent to the 49ers training facilities. I was just an EMF consultant, with a theory I had developed from my clinical work, and a gauss meter and a lot of curiosity. I had a mechanism that nobody in sports media was talking about, and it struck a nerve, going viral, and becoming an international news event — drawing out responses from the 49ers players, the GM, and ownership, prompting discussion across the NFL, and eventually going all the way up to the Commissioner's office.
Story after story was published, with reporters getting important details wrong, or not doing proper due diligence. So I reached out to them with additional context, and even new leads. No one ever bit–no one even responded. Eventually I gave up and decided that if they wouldn't report, then I would have to do it myself, and so I did. That forced a question I hadn't anticipated: what does it mean to report? And what separates what I was doing from what the reporters covering the same story were doing?
Over the whole arc of the 49ers investigation, a total of three journalists reached out to me. One did a hatchet job — the Washington Post piece. One reporter, Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle, wrote a pair of fair summaries of the situation, though he never responded when I wrote back. The third talked to me for nearly an hour, a genuinely good conversation, and then published before she'd had time to incorporate anything I'd said. That one also read as a hatchet job.
I was curious about her process, so I called her back a few weeks later. I wanted to understand how we could have had that conversation and ended up with such an article.
She was honest and transparent about her process. On the question of why she had put my board certification in scare quotes, she said: verify everything — if someone says their mother's name is Diane, verify it. But rather than verifying it, she put it in quotes to remove herself from responsibility in verifying the accuracy of the statement, make it is look like my credentials were in question. On the question of why she hadn't sought out comments from researchers who might be more sympathetic to my proposed mechanisms, she said: I'm not an expert, so I have to rely on experts. I reached out to several of the official organizations responsible for electromagnetic radiation policy and quoted their perspective.
The more we talked, the clearer the full process became. She runs on a tight deadline for each story. She doesn't have time to verify every claim, so she attributes claims to her subjects with quotes that distinguish the difference. She doesn't have time to get a deep understanding of the material herself, so she relies on sources, and seeks out experts — where "expert" is defined as an official who works at an institution with a regulatory or credentialing mandate — the kind of organization whose job is to maintain and defend the current consensus, not interrogate it.
Why didn't she feel the need to use our conversation in her article, where I had referred her to other experts and resources to back up my theory? Well, you have already written so much online, so we feel like we can just pick from that, rather than quoting directly. So when she does the "both sides" thing, she has an official quote from an "expert" representing a "legitimate" institution, and on the other side, a cherry-picked quote from me, with my credentials in scare quotes. At best this system biases institutional interests; at worst it is theatrical rigor masquerading as objectivity, designed to push through a pre-determined agenda.
She's not a bad journalist. By the logic of her training, she is a good journalist who did her job correctly. Her epistemology requires official sources because official sources confer legitimacy, and legitimacy is how institutional journalism earns trust and continued access to official sources. The method selects for a particular kind of truth — but it is a “truth” that is highly subject to the needs of the system.
That conversation is where my operating principles came from:
Become my own expert on every topic I cover.
Use documents as the primary evidentiary base.
Use sources only for additional context.
Offer the subjects of my story the opportunity to comment in their own words.
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My friend David Morrison — who spent years fighting Portland Public Schools over WiFi in classrooms — sent me a piece recently that reaffirmed exactly why these principles are important.
It was by Paul Brodeur, and it appeared in WhoWhatWhy in February 2022. Brodeur was a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly four decades. Early in his career he had broken open the asbestos story — his 1968 investigation into asbestos-caused cancer, "The Magic Mineral," exposed an industry that had spent decades concealing mass occupational death, and won a National Magazine Award. In 1976, he wrote the first articles in any major American publication about the biological effects of microwave radiation — the same year the Soviet Union was bombarding the U.S. embassy in Moscow with a low-level microwave signal called the Moscow Signal. Those pieces were expanded into his book The Zapping of America and earned him the Alicia Patterson Foundation Award. He died in 2023 at 92.
The piece he wrote in 2022 is, among other things, a vicious demolition of a 2018 article published in the same magazine that made him famous.
In November 2018, The New Yorker ran a 10,000-word investigation into Havana Syndrome by Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson. It was the kind of piece that looks, from the outside, like exhaustive reporting. 25,000 words, if not more, riddled with quotes from high-level, inside sources: diplomats, intelligence officials, medical experts. The conclusion the article reached was essentially the conclusion its sources handed them — that nobody in the U.S. government understood what was causing American diplomats to fall ill, that the biological mechanism was a mystery, and that the whole thing was baffling.
The diplomatic sources cited the official government position. The medical experts were working from the same official case files the government controlled. Each appeared to corroborate the other, but they were drawing from the same pool — a closed loop that looked like independent verification and wasn't.
Brodeur's response is measured but ultimately quite devastating. He points out that Entous and Anderson could have walked to the New Yorker's own library — the same building where they worked — and pulled his 1976 articles. If they had, they would have found documented evidence that Soviet radar workers exposed to microwaves during and after World War II experienced headache, fatigue, diminished intellectual capacity, and memory loss. The same symptoms as the Havana Syndrome victims. Documented in their own magazine's archive.
They would also have found documented evidence of the State Department's deliberate effort to suppress awareness of the Moscow Signal — a Kissinger-era cable that Brodeur described as "ventriloquism by satellite," designed to deceive Foreign Service employees about the nature of what was being done to them.
All of that was sitting there, in the library, and they didn't even look.
Entous and Anderson are good journalists by the same standard the reporter who covered me was working from. They had sources. Senior ones, from highly regarded institutions. The sources told them nobody knew what was happening, and the article reflected that — because that's what official sources decided the story would be, and they had stuck to it since 2016.
Brodeur closed his piece with a request: that journalists covering Havana Syndrome vaccinate themselves with skepticism before trusting the government sources who had, decades earlier, gone to significant lengths to deceive the press about the very phenomenon they were now being asked to explain. I would go a step further and ask that journalists covering any story vaccinate themselves with skepticism before trusting any official source.
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The 49ers coverage:
Washington Post:
SF Chronicle, Scott Ostler:
The Brodeur/New Yorker exchange:
Paul Brodeur, WhoWhatWhy:
Adam Entous & Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker:
