There are always going to be crackpots and I understand how tempting it is as a reporter to use the angle to spice up an otherwise boring story. Take smart meters, the new electrical meters currently being adopted by SaskPower and SaskEnergy that enable two-way communication on energy consumption between our homes and the utilities.
It is, without question, a difficult story to cover without lulling your audience to sleep.
But throw in some fear-mongering by an organization with a compelling name like Citizens for Safe Technology (CST) and all of a sudden you've got something people might actually pay attention to.
The Leader-Post recently led a front-page story on the subject with CST's call for the companies to take a step back "out of concern for the amount of radiation emitted by the devices and possible effects to public health," quoting CST CEO Frank Clegg.
"I would like to see Saskatchewan go back to Health Canada and say take me through and satisfy me that this safety code that I am depending on and relying on is actually keeping up with the times-because it isn't, it's sadly out of date," he said according to the Regina newspaper
What is truly sad, here, is that the overwhelming scientific consensus supports Health Canada's guidelines. The story did report that Lloyd Crookshanks, manager of SaskPower's advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) program was satisfied with the devices' safety, but it seems no amount of evidence will ever satisfy Mr. Clegg and the small band of anti-EMF zealots he represents.
For those who have forgotten their high school science, let's review the electromagnetic spectrum. Everything (yes, even human beings) emits electromagnetic radiation. For simplicity's sake, there are basically two kinds-non-ionizing, wavelengths that are too weak to strip electrons from and change the chemistry of other objects; and ionizing, which will cause damage to living tissue with sufficient levels of exposure.
Examples of the former are, in order of increasing energy, radio (including microwave, which includes the frequencies at which smart meters operate), infrared and visible light. Just beyond visible light is ultraviolet light at which point, as anyone who has ever had a sunburn knows, electromagnetic energy becomes damaging to people.
Just knowing these facts should be enough to allay most concerns, but science does not work that way. Even if a hypothesis seems intuitively bullet-proof, we test, retest, verify and reverify.
A recent survey by the World Health Organization of 25,000 studies worldwide concluded, "Current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields."
On the other hand, anti-EMF activists cite only a handful of largely discredited studies. Following a September CTV Toronto report by Pauline Chan about an anti-WiFi protest at a Mississauga Elementary School, Bad Science Watch issued the following statement in an open letter to the TV station.
"Most worrying were the "facts" offered at the end of the piece referencing the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM), a fringe organisation [sic] that has no recognition as a medical authority and whose lack of credibility is routinely demonstrated by their casual disregard for facts and evidence in forming opinions. The claim that "30 per cent of the population may be suffering from delayed effects of WiFi exposure" is entirely unsubstantiated and unsupported by rigorous scientific research. A simple Google search for published references would have revealed this, but Ms. Chan or her producers appear to have accepted this fact uncritically. The result was a report that spread a great deal of misinformation about a safe, proven technology that is helping thousands of schoolchildren every day, and stoked unjustified concern in the audience."
AAEM appears to be basing its position on a single study entitled Self-Reporting of Symptom Development from Exposure to Wireless Smart Meters' Radiofrequency Fields in Victoria [Australia].
On October 23, the AAEM board of directors passed a resolution that stated:
"The peer reviewed, scientific literature demonstrates the correlation between EMF/RF exposure and neurological, cardiac, and pulmonary disease as well as reproductive disorders, immune dysfunction, cancer and other health conditions. The evidence is irrefutable."
If AAEM was truly a credible scientific organization, it would recognize that correlation is not causation and that self-reported symptoms do not constitute reliable evidence.
The only good thing about the resolution, perhaps, is that it calls for "further research regarding smart meter health effects."
I would never suggest that more research is a bad thing, but this issue has been studied to death ever since microwave ovens became common household items in the mid-to-late 1970s and AAEM's "irrefutable" evidence has been refuted time and time again, by reliable clinical studies.
If you could climb inside your microwave and turn it on, it would, in fact, kill you by cooking you to death (as would a conventional oven), but the actual evidence simply does not support the contention that casual exposure to the radiation emitted by microwave ovens, cell phones, baby monitors, school WiFi networks and smart meters has any adverse health effects.
Despite overwhelming scientific consensus, many mainstream media reports, such as the two cited in this column, continue to unnecessarily sensationalize and lend credence to fringe positions on science and technology issues.
It is a noble tradition in journalism to present all sides of a story. It is one of the great tenets of our profession, but sometimes there is only one credible side to a debate and it is not incumbent upon us to present every outrageous conspiracy theory.
We are taught to be objective, but objectivity is not the same thing as neutrality. Being objective is the process of weighing the veracity of information and reporting without personal bias. Neutrality is the process of giving all viewpoints equal credence without critical analysis. Establishing false equivalencies in this manner is dangerous as it gives unsubstantiated opinion the same weight as actual data.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former United States senator, perhaps said it best when he quipped, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
