For several years I have been a reader of Daily Kos articles and I considered the site the best US source of critical and thought-provoking articles on climate change, science, education, politics and much more.
In the last two month, I observed a radical change, which is connected to Kos’ March15th edict. Basically, the edict put everyone who criticizes H. Clinton under a general suspicion of being right-wing. If the interpretation is that the diary is ‘malicious’, then the diarist can be banned. Because ‘malicious’ is a highly flexible category (it gives me no joy to say that authoritarian governments such as Erdogan’s government in Turkey use such categories to suppress free press and free speech), essentially everyone who criticizes Clinton can be excluded from the DailyKos community. As a consequence, an increasing number of long-term diarists, is banned from DailyKos. Many of those diarists wrote great, thought-provoking articles.
Instead of this older diarists, an increasing number of new diarists have emerged, who write marketing-style pro-Clinton and kitchen-sink-style anti-Sanders diaries. An eye-opening example for me was a diarist who joined Daily-Kos two days ago and published today a “Hillary-is-so-nice-diary” that has a Clinton-campaign marketing flavor. (My critical comment to this diary was flagged and is now invisible). Noam Chomsky would call the evolution of Daily Kos to Daily HRC a nice example of “manufacturing consent”.
I miss the earlier critical and thought-provoking articles and I find the new marketing-style and kitchen-sink-style diaries simply boring.
I have two questions question:
(1) What do you think about this development? Am I too critical?
(2) Is this irreversible? Has DKOS changed into DHRC for good, or is there a chance to get the old DKOS back?