July 11, 2010 07:11 PM UTC

Denver Post's blatant censorship of comments

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• by: bullshit!

Over at the Singleton Post, they have finally figured out how to get comments on their political blog! Unfortunately, the method they devised for doing so isn’t likely to work very long.

What they did was have the most clueless member of the Post editorial board, Chuck Plunkett, “write” an almost incomprehensible defense of Jane Norton, after she agreed with Tom Tancredo that Obama is a greater threat to America than nuclear war and terrorism. Plunkett’s vapid observation that Norton “isn’t that out there” for agreeing, and “who isn’t tired of political correctness?” have resulted in a huge number of comments.

Unfortunately, most of the comments consist of statements like “the crashing quality and rapid demise of the Denver Post is stark to behold,” and “Chuck, Responsible Journalism called. It wants you to retire.” It’s nice to see a “Comments” link with a number greater than zero, but this isn’t the kind of attention they want.

Much worse for their community is the arbitrary and capricious censorship.

If you’ve ever tried to comment on a Denver Post blog, you already know that the comments don’t appear right away. Every comment left at the Denver Post’s blogs is filtered by staff. In this case, both comments I submitted were published, but I’ve talked with several others who say that their comments were never published.

And here is the difference, at least in the case of this blog by Plunkett about Norton and Tancredo: the Post appears to be letting comments critical of Plunkett go live, but not comments that criticize the Denver Post’s management – especially comments that name Dean Singleton or Dan Haley. A friend forwarded me two examples of comments he wrote at the Post’s political blog, both addressing Singleton and one addressing Haley as well. BOTH WERE CENSORED, and nothing in the content of those posts was otherwise objectionable.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? A newspaper sends legal threats to the state’s biggest political blog, demanding without legal grounds that this blog stops quoting them. A response one user received from the Post said in essence, “if you want to read the Denver Post’s stuff, visit the Post.”

But if you criticize the Post management who is forcing you to their forum, you are censored.

What possible motivation can the Post offer for visiting their site, or these new “local” sites they say they’re going to create, when the free speech we enjoy on blogs we CHOOSE to read does not exist there?