Do you think the original post about the earthquake that has

[Baja Margie]

attracted so much attention by the Times and Fox News was......

[Baja Margie]

1. I say it was innocent

and I'm feeling pretty weird now about "censorship" at the DU.

[jellybelly]

2. voted ignorant cause I don't know what you're talking about

[jpgray]

3. Based on what I read, it was innocent

DU has enough authentic belief there apparently to get it rolling from even an innocent starting point.

[MotR]

4. How about a link to "the original post"?

[Baja Margie]

7. You'll find it

in here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2907807&mesg_id=2907807

[NYC]

5. I say it doesn't matter one way or the other.

Someone said something. Right, wrong, or indifferent, how does that reflect badly on all of us? It doesn't.

Stop worrying about what the neighbor's think.

[Nothing Without Hope]

6. She SAID it was a "dumb question" ...

...and in at least one of her replies later in a thread discussing the NYT story, when she said she was leaving the DU board, she said that she believes that the planet Earth is alive. That's called the "Gaia hypothesis" and can be thought of as a kind of spiritual or religious view. From the tone of her post in that thread, she was embarrassed at a minimum and possibly distraught by what happened. I believe she was innocent of malice or ulterior motives.

The NYT twisted the truth about that DU thread in an extremely unethical way, as outlined in the DU administrator's article on the home page. What the NYT did was not journalism, but a sloppy, totally misleading hatchet job.

I do wonder about the motivation of the Times editors in chosing to publish that story, and I also wonder how, in all the thousands upon thousands of DU posts, that specific one was chosen. I doubt we'll ever know.

I do feel sorry for the person who posted her "dumb question." It was a brutal thing that happened to her, and IMO the NYT owes her an apology.

[Baja Margie]

9. I agree with you

but I'm pissed off at Skinner for calling it an "ignorant" question (post).


Pissed me off.

[Placebo]

8. It was probably planted by a reporter...

who had nothing better to write about.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

10. This is just my opinion on this, but...

I read the original thread. I've read the follow up threads. I read Skinners rebuttal thread.

The person who started it was more or less bouncing ideas off the wall. At the least that's the impression I got from it. Things quickly grew until it was a shit throwing storm of epic proportions.

I think the Times really should have spent the column space more wisely. There are more important matters going on in the world today after all. Not that they seem to care very much about covering them.

[Nothing Without Hope]

11. Exactly. This event didn't reflect well on ANYONE.

The original poster was brutalized, in my opinion. She didn't present herself as trying to push an idea, she was asking a question and said right in her post title that it was "dumb." She was bouncing an idea around, as you say. In return, the national press jumped on her few words and branded her a total fool, a nut-case crank. Some then went on to claim her "foolishness" was typical of the DU board and by extension all Democrats. Now THAT was more than foolishness, that was MADNESS! And there was some malice too. By no stretch of the imagination did that poor woman deserve to be caught up in any of that.

That the NYT did what it did is not to be understood. But what CAN be understood is that it was unnecessary, misleading, and brutally unkind.

This event does raise some disturbing questions about what to do with innocent questions on the DU board that could be taken as foolish. Do we now shut up and delete all such posts because they are a community embarrassment that might be picked up by the MSM? A disturbing idea.