Criticism
Discussions from posters at DU have drawn criticism. One example of this was the dialog about the 2004 tsunami disaster, in which a few posts explored the possibility of "earthquake weapons". The posts were reported by The New York Times and Fox News. The DU administrators deleted these posts and the threads were locked. The administrators officially disavowed what they called "kooky tsunami conspiracy theories". They added, "One wonders why the author did not spend five minutes over at Free Republic and instead write an article about how conservatives think the tsunami was some sort of retribution from God, or how Muslims deserved it." The administrators also sent a letter to the Times, which was printed.
Another example is the conspiracy theories revolving around the August 2006 terror plot to blow up airliners between the UK and the US, which received mention in USA Today. Some posters felt that the American government's push to release the announcement of the plot was a conspiracy to bump Joe Lieberman's primary loss out of the news cycle.
The site also saw criticism when, in 2003, a poster explained why he or she wished to see continued bloodshed in Iraq, and in the days following the death of Ronald Reagan, when profane comments appeared that expressed joy over his passing.
In August of 2012, administrators revoked the posting privileges of Dennis Roddy, a veteran journalist who had joined the administration of Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, a Republican. Roddy had posted under his own name, responding to theories promoted on DU, that Corbett had somehow delayed a child abuse investigation into former Penn State defensive coach Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky had been convicted of 45 criminal counts on charges brought through a state grand jury to which Corbett, as attorney general, had taken the complaints.
The site was also criticized by the online Oregon newspaper Salem-News.com for a thread about a video posted by the newspaper in which a former Israeli soldier described what the newspaper called "the war crimes committed against the Palestinians back in 1948." Because some DU posters criticized the piece, the newspaper wrote that DU had "decided to take a stand for apartheid", although it described another post in the thread (one critical of Israel) as "absolutely correct".
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)