Once a week, I have a column in News With Views ( http://www.newswithviews.com ). Last week, I wrote about “church leaders” fleeing from the culture war.
I heard from a couple of readers who wondered if I was quite all there: not because of anything I said, but because of an ad that ran on the same page. It featured a semi-nude woman posed seductively to invite “male gamers” into some kind of imaginary orgy. Hubba-hubba, etc. One reader wanted to know what I thought I was doing, having an ad like that to go along with my column. He said it looked like I was pushing soft-core pornography.
Who, me? I have absolutely nothing to do with whatever ads appear on my page. I passed my readers’ objections on to the editor-in-chief, who soon discovered what had happened.
The ads were put there by Google. ‘Nuff said. This has happened to me before, and to many other writers. You write a column opposing the same-sex parody of marriage, and right up next to it, Google drops an ad for a “gay dating” service.
I am convinced Google does this on purpose, to make the writer look like a hypocrite or, at best, an ass. There’s no reason why the ordinary reader should know how a particular ad winds up on a particular page. So a lot of these readers wind up blaming it on the poor, innocent writer. And the reds at Google score another point against conservatives.
So, in case you’ve ever wondered why an ad for a dominatrix appears next to a column objecting to aberrant sexual lifestyles, remember–the writer didn’t put it there. And on most websites, neither did the editor.
Google did it… to mess with your mind.