TAKE a medium-size cooking pot. Half fill it with water; toss in a handful of politicians; add a pinch of titled ignorance and a generous sprinkle of irresponsible journalism. Now add a stressed manager or two, along with a dash of scientific uncertainty and a little religious fervour, and gently bring to the boil. In just a few minutes we will have a bubbling cauldron of moral panic.

In the past few months we have witnessed excessive and erroneous hyperbole created by the Y2K problem [see Electronic Telegraph's Y2K forum] and genetically modified foods. More recently it has been mobile phones cooking our brains, and 12 months ago we had Dolly the celebrity (cloning) sheep. The list seems endless, and the reporting merciless, as the media make every effort to perturb society and upset individuals with the distorted reporting of everything from thrombosis and contraception to unreliable drugs.

Networked technology means we can now communicate faster, with more people in more locations, across the whole spectrum of interests. But unfortunately we are often fed information prematurely from dubious or unqualified sources. So it is interesting to examine the qualifications of those responsible for the initial reporting, their objectivity, and supposed impartiality. How about the history graduate reporting on GM foods, or the English graduate delving into the dangers of cloning, or someone with no particular qualification worrying about mobile phones?

No wonder we see almost every major issue misrepresented with leading arguments distorted or inaccurately presented, and no wonder we live in a society that fosters technofear. Developing the skills to interpret and rank the credibility of all forms of information looks like becoming a new growth industry.

It is amazing that anyone in any company or government should imagine for a second that they can contain and control information. Sooner or later, and generally sooner, all bits become free. A bit-based world has to be one where bit access is a right. But along with that right of access comes a new responsibility to get educated, to make the effort to understand before actively entering a debate or setting off alarms. Judging by the present furore on GM foods, you might have thought the end of the world was upon us (again).

I wonder how many of you go to sleep at night worrying about your microwave oven? Here is an everyday device, usually mounted at head or torso height, generating a radio energy of around 1,000 Watts. When was the last time you had the door seal checked? If a mobile phone with a maximum radiated energy of much less than 0.5 Watt really has the potential (which I very much doubt) to cook our brains and promote memory loss, imagine what a fraction of 1,000 Watts can do. If you use a laptop computer, perhaps you should worry about the radio energy radiated directly into the tissue of your nether regions, too.

I am not for one moment suggesting we should become in any way complacent. But reference to decades of experience may be less destabilising than nonsensical debate and reporting. Cloning, genetic modification and exposure to radio energy have good safety records and histories spanning 100 to 500 million years.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk