Calming Public Fears

Every morning at SLAC the communications office, or all of us available at the time, trek over to the SLAC cafeteria for a morning coffee, breakfast, and a chat. It's a great way to start the day, a relaxed meeting where all conversation can be business or absolutely none of it. And it gets us out of the office creating opportunities to network with the rest of SLAC and occasionally solicit story ideas....

Anyways, today's breakfast was abnormally long and interesting. We had a visitor eating with us that morning, Peter Fisher, head of the MIT Particle and Nuclear Experimental Physics division.

Fisher and a team of researchers from MIT recently made a major breakthrough in the area of wireless electricity technology. Apparently it is quite feasible, and possibly even easy, to do away with the whole system of electric outlets and cords. Instead, some sort of long wave electromagnetic waves would permeate the area which special chips could transform into electricity using resonance to build up the charge. Theoretically, the correct wavelength could cause vibrations in a device to build up until energy is transferred between the two. I'm a bit sketchy on the details, and this is not the point of this entry, but for more accurate and complete information, look at the BBC or the Boston Business.

His team recently started a company that holds the patent to this technology and they're already planning meetings with potential investors. The idea is to just sell the technology to any interested parties such as, oh I don't know, Motorola.

The conversation eventually wandered into the area of public health. Think about this technology for a second, what it does, what it implies, and now imagine the number of people that are going to be scared more electromagnetic waves in the air will somehow give them cancer or something. It's a legitimate worry, but the Fisher assures that the technology is completely harmless. Apparently, we get a much higher radiation dose flying across the country than we ever would from this technology over 100 year time span.

Fisher is a prestigious physics professor at MIT. His word is good enough for me. But there are plenty of people who won't be convinced. There are people who think power lines and cell phones kill, and still others who don't believe we ever landed on the moon... Not everyone will be convinced.

So what is the best way of handling the skeptics?

The general idea seemed to be to listen to them, listen to their worries, take them seriously, and make it a united problem. Assure them that their worries are your worries and everybody wants the same thing, safety, and nothing will go foreward until it is proven safe. The point was made to not create any type of conflict because the second you do, the media will be all over it. The moment there is a conflict, even where one shouldn't exist, there is a story.

Now this sounds harsh on journalists, but I think it's true. Sure there are a ton of responsible journlists out there who would ask all of the right questions, get their facts striaght, and write a fair article that tells the truth. But it only takes a few to run with the false conflict, blow the story out of proportions, get the facts wrong, and create a giant mess out of the whole situation.

So walking the fine line between giving enough information, keeping journalists happy, and keeping the public calm, is yet another aspect of a media relations job not usually handled by a journalist.

My future career path y'all.... Oh happy days lay ahead...