Won’t somebody, please, think of the children? Three weeks ago I received this email from a science teacher. ‘I’ve just had to ask a BBC Panorama film crew not to film in my school or in my class because of the bad science they were trying to carry out,’ it began, then went on to describe in perfect detail the Panorama programme which aired this week. This show was on the suppressed dangers of radiation from wi-fi networks, and how they are harming children. There was no science in it, just some ‘experiments’ the programme-makers did for themselves, and some duelling experts. Panorama disagreed with the WHO expert, so he was smeared for not being ‘independent’ enough, and working for a phone company in the past. I don’t do personal smears. But Panorama started it. Independence is clearly very important to them. How independent were the BBC, and the ‘experiments’ they did?
They had twenty-eight minutes, I have seven hundred words.
In the show, you can see them walking around Norwich with a special ‘radiation monitor’. Radiation is their favourite word, and they use it thirty times, once a minute, although wi-fi is ‘radiation’ in the same sense that light is. ‘Ooh, it’s well into the red there,’ says reporter Paul Kenyon, holding up the detector. That sounds bad.
Well into the red on what? It’s tricky to calibrate measurements, and to decide what to measure, and where the cut-off should be for ‘red’. Panorama’s readings were ‘well into the red’ on ‘the COM Monitor’, a special piece of detecting equipment designed from scratch and built by Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch: the man who leads the campaign against wi-fi. His bespoke device is manufactured exclusively for his own outfit, Powerwatch, and he will sell one to you for just £175. Alasdair decided what ‘red’ meant on Panorama’s device. That’s not very independent.
Panorama did not disclose where this detector came from. And they know that Alasdair Philips is no ordinary ‘engineer doing the readings’, because they told us in the show, but they didn’t tell the school that, as our science teacher says: ‘They wanted to take some measurements in my classroom, compare them to the radiation from a phone mast and film some kids using wireless laptops. They introduced “the engineer”, whom I googled.’
He found it was the same man who runs Powerwatch, the pressure group campaigning against mobile phones, wi-fi and ‘electrosmog’. As our science teacher explained, this man isn’t necessarily very independent. In Alasdair’s Powerwatch shop you can buy shielded netting for your windows at just £70.50 per metre, and special shielding paint at £50.99 per litre. To paint just one small, eleven-foot-square bedroom refuge in your house with Powerwatch’s products would require about ten litres of this special product, costing you £500.
When the children saw Alasdair’s Powerwatch website, and the excellent picture of the insulating mesh beekeeper hat that he sells (£27) to ‘protect your head from excess microwave exposure’, they were astonished and outraged. Panorama were calmly expelled from the school.
So what about Panorama’s classroom experiment? It wasn’t very well designed, as was pointed out by a classroom full of children at the time. ‘They set about downloading the biggest file they could get hold of – so the wi-fi signal was working as powerfully as possible – and took the peak reading during that,’ says our science teacher. It was a great teaching exercise, and the children made valuable criticisms of Panorama’s methodology, including: ‘We’re not allowed to download files, so it wouldn’t be that strong,’ ‘Only a couple of classes have wi-fi,’ and ‘We only use the laptops a couple of times a week.’
Panorama planned to have the man from Powerwatch talk to the students for about ten minutes about how wi-fi worked, and what effects it had on the human body. Then they were going to reveal the readings he had got from the mast, compare them to what Powerwatch had measured in the classroom, and film the kids’ reaction to the news. None of this sounds very independent.
‘Surprisingly enough, the readings in my room were going to be higher (about three times higher, I believe), and with the kids having been briefed by the engineer from Powerwatch first, they were hoping for a reaction that would make good telly.’ Sadly for them, it didn’t happen. ‘We told Panorama this morning that as they hadn’t been honest with us about what was going on and because of the bad science they were trying to pass off, we didn’t want them to film in the school or with our students.’ The images of children you see in the programme are just library footage.
I’m sure there should be more research into wi-fi. If Panorama had made a twenty-eight-minute programme about the scientific evidence, we would be discussing that. Instead they produced ‘radiation’ scares, and smears about whether people are ‘independent’. People in glass houses throw stones at their own risk.
A BBC spokesperson said: ‘Alasdair Philips is one of a handful of people with the right equipment to do this test. He was only used in this capacity and was not given an opportunity to interpret the readings let alone campaign on them in the film. We filmed the tests taken at the school and didn’t return.’