During the run-up to the Super Bowl in early February, physician Mitchell Berger, the lead consultant to the National Football League on the long-term effects of brain and spine injury, met with the news media.
It didn’t go well.
Several reporters quarreled with Berger’s assessment of the neurological injury known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Asked if playing football was “linked” to CTE, Berger hedged on the meaning of link. One newspaper called his statements “shameful.” Even as he spoke, the Hollywood movie Concussion was faulting the NFL for having disputed the discovery of CTE in a retired player 10 years earlier. A book about the controversy, League of Denial, had come out in 2013, and yet here the facts — as reporters understood them — were being challenged again.
