All of a sudden, according to many news outlets, the bombing in Nashville is part of a nutball protest against 5G, a phone technology that has developed a lot of detractors, myself included. This is because I was fired over writing about it.
In August of 2018, I wrote a rather innocuous column for PC Magazine about the public relations problems that 5G was going to have if certain complaints are not addressed. This column was removed within a couple of weeks and then replaced by a column extolling the virtues of 5G. Then, out-of-the-blue, I was let go with no real explanation and that was that. The original column was captured by archive.org and is posted here.
The column was innocuous and perhaps to get attention I should have included this cartoon.
I then noticed that a lot of pro-5G writings were, in fact, native ads bought and paid for by the various 5G vendors.
For those of you unfamiliar, native advertising is the payment to publishers by advertisers to run specific fawning articles extolling the virtues of the advertiser’s products. These are all run as if they were actual articles written by objective journalists. There is supposed to be a subtle mention that the article is sponsored, but that is often covered up.
I wrote one lone column about this for Medium which was within days put on hiatus. Apparently because I was bitching about native advertising. Native advertising seems to be the last way to make money in newspaper and magazine publishing.
Then I did some research on my own writings and noticed that I had never written about native advertising for PC Magazine or any publication that would be using native advertising for income. Very few people have. I could write about it here on Substack and I’ve rambled about it on podcasts, such as the No Agenda Show. But, for the most part nobody ever writes about it without a risk of losing their jobs.
This episode of equating the Nashville explosion with a 5G protest seems to me to be more of an announcement by news organizations telling the phonecos pushing 5G that they are open for business and will welcome the scads of money spent on dubious 5G promotion.
And I’m not about to go into an anti-5G rant. I let others do it. Here is a reading list.
“Massive Predicted Effects of 5G,” Cours d’EHS– Dec. 17, 2019
“The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network,” the New Yorker, April 2019
“5G Is Coming: How Worried Should We Be about the Health Risks?” Scientific American, Sept 2019
I could find more. And yes, there are plenty of pro-5G articles and columns too. But how many of those were bought and paid for? All the big media companies seem to have sold out their readers with this mechanism. And by all, I mean all. – jcd
December 29, 2020
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