Weighing in on Interphone and the Media

Waking up to the media reports last week was absolutely fascinating. If I didn’t know any better, and didn’t have absolute faith in the scientific experts I had interviewed, I might have taken Full Signal off the market, with a very embarrassed apology.

“No Link Between Mobile Phone Use and Brain Cancer” is the headline many of the newspapers screamed in the variety of languages that I saw thanks to friends of mine (in disbelief at the biased coverage) that forwarded me articles that morning.

And acquaintances I met during the day and for a few days later touted the media reports as justification for continued use of their phones (no, not everyone I know has jumped onto the Full Signal bandwagon, as it were).

Why were so many people around the world so willing to listen to these media reports? I know not everyone has the access to the scientific experts Microwave News does…but I mean haven’t we learned from other, non-mobile phone-related, experiences that “mainstream” media is not always the most accurate? I used to be part of that system, and I know it’s usually not intentional, but with deadlines, budget cuts, etc, journalists often don’t have the time or money to do the proper in-depth research that needs to be done…but I digress…

People embraced the Interphone report as the gospel of mobile phone research for the same reason that the regulation of this technology is so difficult. Not because they are all in the pockets of the industry (unlike much of the mainstream media that covered the Interphone report, which was, in turn, funded largely by the industry). But people love this technology so much, they have bought it for themselves, given it to their children, discarded their landlines (for those that even had them to begin with), adopted WiFi and cordless phones, baby monitors, wireless headphones, the list goes on and on and…wait, now they’re saying it’s safe!

They’re even saying that moderate users were found to have a lesser prevalence of brain tumors than non-users…see we should use this technology!

Ignore the fact that scientists that were part of the Interphone study were screaming about biased results. Ignore the part of the article beneath the fold that says that heavy users were found to have a higher risk of developing brain tumors, ignore the fact that due to the prevalence of this technology the majority of users are heading into the category of heavy users, and ignore the fact that when we started researching for this film in the spring of 2008, there was already a whirlwind of controversy surrounding the Interphone study…

…People just want to go on believing that this technology can’t not be safe.

My hat goes off to the Australian government that upheld a warning against the young using cell phones, and at the end of the day, my hat goes off to the mobile phone industry for quite successfully winning this “battle” in the “war” of awareness. More independent research needs to be done. More research will be done…

…let’s just hope that by the time those results come out, we’re not looking at a larger number of “casualties” thanks to the false sense of security the mass media has put into the minds of so many mobile phone users around the world.