I say ol’ chap, want to know how you rate as a reporter of mobile phone health & safety issues in the United Kingdom? Ring up the Federation of the Electronics Industry. Not that they’ll tell you, but the folks at FEI are following your every word.
FEI-via Report International-tracks UK media stories on tower siting, lawsuits, health scares, etc. The June report, obtained by RCR, is just out. It monitored UK national, business, consumer and trade press, and coded stories as being positive, negative or neutral relative to the industry position.
The results? You guessed it: There are a lot of mobile phone health and safety stories out there and a lot of them FEI considers negative.
Once upon a time, in the early ’90s when cell phone-cancer hysteria was at fever pitch, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association used CARMA International to figure out which reporters at what outlets were swallowing the industry line-stuff like, “industry-sponsored cancer research will prove there’s no danger” or “thousands of studies already prove cell phones safe.” Truth is, arrogance and bad form aside, CTIA may be right. But it guaranteed no one would ever believe it.
CTIA later dropped CARMA, but recently signed the D.C. firm again for work described as limited and narrow in scope, for now.
This is all too strange. While wireless carriers around the globe can arguably claim RF science is on their side, they cannot say the same about the mass media.
Increasingly, wireless stories are focusing on the negative (and fantastic)-possible health risks, unsafe drivers, rude yakkers, ugly towers that lower home values, medical device interference, explosion dangers at gas stations, lawsuits, etc.-rather than on positive benefits for safety, business and education.
You could say this is the painful price of success. Mobile phones are the rage worldwide-icons of the booming ’90s, with a new postage stamp to prove it. Subscribership is up, up and away in developed and developing markets alike. The sky is the limit.
So you can understand that negative press drives the wireless industry nuts, accuracy and objectively of stories not withstanding.
U.S. and Brit wireless types apparently believe they can better shape their message with more intelligence about how reporters react to health and safety-related news and to storylines fed to them by trade associations.
The industry has it 180 degrees backwards.
Industry should be more concerned with how it reacts to journalists. FEI and CARMA should track industry flacks. How else to explain this public-relations disaster the industry has got itself into and cannot seem to shake? Defensive, caustic, arrogant, defiant, secretive-anything but calm and straightforward.
Industry just doesn’t get it; its body language hasn’t changed in the six years since Florida’s David Reynard made the cell phone-cancer claim heard ’round the world (before losing his lawsuit).
By the way, in FEI’s compilation of institutions & companies mentioned in mobile phone health & safety stories in June, Wireless Technology Research L.L.C. scored dead last, behind such august bodies as Friends of the Earth and the metropolitan police. That’s what $27 million will buy you.
