Simply saying that more health research is needed on 5G —the latest generation of cell phone technology— can be hazardous to your reputation.

Last May, the New York Times tried to take down David Carpenter, a public health physician and the country’s most prominent 5G critic. Veteran science writer William Broad painted Carpenter as a willing tool of a disinformation campaign promoted by RT America, a TV network which he described as “the cat’s paw of Russian president, Vladimir Putin.” The page-one story ran under the headline, “Your 5G Phone Won’t Hurt You But Russia Wants You To Think Otherwise.”

Two months later, on July 16, Broad was back for another hit on Carpenter. This time, he was given most of the front page of the Times’ Tuesday science section, to portray Carpenter as a fringe player working “hard to revise established science.”

Much of what Broad wrote was fiction.