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Comment by davidmr | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? He says PC Magazine fired him because he was critical of his 5G article and that rankled the magazine's sponsors. Who specifically are the sponsors he's thinking of? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this is what happened?

So they linked his article about 5G to a different one. Why does that mean he was fired for writing the article? I feel like an application of Hanlon's Razor (not quite right, but I don't know of someone else's who fits the situation better) is called for. Is it more likely the editors thought his article sucked and used their editorial discretion to redirect his 5G article to a different one or that there was a conspiracy between his advertisers and the magazine's management to fire a guy who's been wrong on just about everything for the last 30 years because he hit the nail too close to the head?

I don't buy it.

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Having run a newspaper, I can confirm that advertisers do contact management and say "I didn't like that article, do something about it or we won't be advertising with you again". And the financial pressure is intense. You have many, many staff to pay, and the commercial pressure to keep advertisers happy is real and difficult to manage.

I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story. It happens every day. Luckily I never had to do it, but there were times I was very tempted.

I totally agree with his comment that the only way journalism is going to survive is if readers start paying for it. What we have now is mostly not-journalism.

> I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story.

As an example of where it has happened:

> Gerstmann revealed that his firing was in fact related to the low review score he had given to Kane & Lynch, though his explanation cited other similar events that led up to the termination, including a 7.5 (good) rating given to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction by Aaron Thomas, then an employee under Gerstmann. Events such as these led to him being "called into a room" several times to discuss reviews posted on the site. Gerstmann went on to lay the blame on a new management team that was unable to properly handle tension between the marketing and editorial staff, laying additional blame on the marketing department, which he claimed was unprepared in how to handle publisher complaints and threats to withdraw advertising money over low review scores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann

Lots more examples in my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media

Search for Access:

I don’t deny at all that it happens, and I understand that management has a difficult path to tread, but he just threw out a claim that it had happened to him with absolutely no evidence or even plausible story of who did it or why.

Do you find it believable that he was fired over this?

A person who's been writing the same type of inflammatory articles for 30 years is suddenly fired, while an article he wrote recently blasting 5G is completely replaced by a new article favorable to 5G... I think you're using Hanlan's Razor to cut in the wrong direction this time.

It's entirely possible that this not very good column was some sort of final straw and there's some history we don't know leading up to it. The story as told still seems very odd but, of course, we're only hearing one side of it.

On the upside, if Dvorak thought 5G was crap, then it’s practically guaranteed to be a fantastic and successful technology.

Not that I read the article that was removed, but in this he said he wasn't even that critical himself, just pointing towards all the other critical articles and noting they need to fix whatever is causing them to be written.

So the jury is still out for 5G, not a guaranteed success ?

This is the actual article: http://archive.is/aCge1 It's mostly fearmongering about 5G affecting people's health which doesn't even seem to be that founded in the one other article he linked to, which contained different fearmongering about the potential health effects of 5G.

Ziff-Davis magazines (original owner of PC Magazine) were never known for editorial integrity, even when they were in print format...

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