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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

If that's the intent, it's poorly written.

It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have been brought up with pretty much every new radio technology.

If you just say there's a bunch of scary information out there (without even pointing to anything specific), you leave the impression that there's likely some truth in all of it.

Dvorak at least was a pretty high profile tech columnist. But he's tended toward a clickbait style even before there were links to click on.

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He did say that topic having a real lack of studies was the main problem. 5G radiation is not the same as previous cellphone radiation which does have "XYZ studies dispute these health effects".

Sometimes presenting both sides of the argument would require making up an other side of the argument or propping it up because it doesn't exist or is bad. In that case presenting both sides of the argument would be sensationalizing.

I read this as him saying that the industry is trying to make unstudied radiation ubiquitous in our lives. The industry is not used to this pushback. The PR that results is bad.

Critical reading does not mean reacting to your first impression on the article. Especially when discussing whether the work of a man who's been covering tech since 1980 was censored over it.

That maybe the case, but bad enough to get fired over? That’s not clear to me.

The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You’re kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there’s not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.

Please let's not just surrender to "That's how modern writing works." I suppose it is at some publications, perhaps including pcmag.com. But there are plenty of thoughtful, researched articles and columns out there to read. That column has maybe a tweet's worth of content.

It’s not how things work everywhere I’m sure. But it seems likely in this case. As such, the content doesn’t surprise me, and I would put the blame solely on the author in this case.

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