On Saturday, high-profile blog Firedoglake hosted a live reader chat with Ohio 2nd Congressional candidate, Dr. Vic Wulsin. Reasonable questions from me and other posters were systematically deleted and may indicate a policy of censorship by that blog.

Firedoglake was founded by movie producer Jane Hamsher. Ms. Hamsher and her blog have been outspoken voices in the progressive movement, most recently championing Ned Lamont’s challenge and victory over Sen.  Joe Lieberman in last month’s Connecticut primary. Ms. Hamsher has also forcefully and repeatedly criticized the Washington Post for deleting political comments on the Post’s website, including this January 26, 2006 column she wrote for the Huffington Post.

Here’s what happened Saturday. As Beacon readers know, I’ve been trying to get a copy of a report Dr. Wulsin wrote for the Heimlich Institute about “malariotherapy,*” as reported last year by Radar Magazine. Since “malariotherapy” and other Heimlich medical theories have long been discredited as useless and dangerous - like using the Heimlich maneuver to save drowning victims and to cure asthma - I wanted to find out why Dr. Wulsin had been working at the Heimlich Institute for at least four months last year. In fact, Dr. Wulsin says .

For months Dr. Wulsin and her campaign have been giving me the runaround. First they ignored my requests, then they promised to give me a copy of her Heimlich report. On Saturday afternoon, I learned that Dr. Wulsin was doing her live chat on Firedoglake. I only found out when the interview was almost over, but I managed to post this signed question to Dr. Wulsin. Note that my comment is numbered 176 and was posted at 1:48 pm. Dr. Wulsin’s next comment followed. (It’s unclear if she had seen my message.)

Since Dr. Wulsin was wrapping it up, I quickly sent another message which I think was posted as comment 178. I wasn’t able to save the screenshot, but I wrote something like:

Dr. Wulsin then replied to me at 1:55 pm:

To which I sent my third and final message which I think was posted as comment 179. I wrote something like:

That’s when things got interesting. Almost immediately after my two comments were posted, they were deleted! My comments disappeared and other comments were bumped up in the sequence to replace them. See for yourself.

Then a handful of follow-up posts appeared, referring to my now-deleted comments. These comments are still online at Firedoglake:

To summarize:

I asked Dr. Wulsin a legitimate question that pertains directly to her political platform, which focuses on her career in public health. I only did so on the Firedoglake live chat because she and her staff had ducked all my previous attempts to get the Heimlich report**. I didn’t use profanity and I was professional. My question was so quickly deleted that no one reading the chat had any idea what I was asking about. Nevertheless, false and derogatory comments about me were allowed to remain. I was prohibited from asking or answering questions, but multiple readers and moderator Howie Klein*** were allowed to trash me.

As for the idea that I am a “rightwing nutjob,” Beacon readers will fall down laughing at that one! Is this how Firedoglake handles disagreement, to label people as “rightwing” and then use that as an excuse to delete their comments?

As it turns out I wasn’t the only one getting censored. Others wrote me that their comments were also being disappeared.

One person wrote me and said she noticed that Dr. Wulsin avoided answering a number of posted questions about single-payer health insurance. Towards the end of the interview, this person says she posted a comment along the lines of, “Dr. Wulsin presents herself as an expert on health issues, but won’t give an answer to questions about single-payer health insurance.” This is paraphrased because the person didn’t take a screenshot of their comment before posting. She told me her comment was immediately deleted. Again, this was a polite, on-topic comment with no profanity. The only sin? To challenge Dr. Wulsin. (Eventually Dr. Wulsin did respond to the questions about single-payer health insurance, but her answer was only to say it was a complex issue and she finessed stating her position.)

But wait, there’s more. Turns out that posts asking why posts were being deleted were also immediately deleted. A poster called anon wrote three separate comments, all of which were immediately deleted. anon then re-posted the three deleted posts and saved the results in the screenshots below. Check the 3:14 pm date stamp of this one which got posted as comment 200:

anon says his 3:14 pm comment above was deleted within a couple minutes. (Here’s comment 200 on Firedoglake today. As you can see, anon’s comment is gone.) Not to be dissuaded, anon then re-posted the same triple-deleted messages again. Note the 3:32 pm date stamp and comment number 201:

anon says his 3:32 pm comment was again immediately deleted. Here’s comment 201 on Firedoglake today. anon’s comments? Nowhere to be found.

But anon says he doesn’t like censorship, especially by those who espouse free speech, so he tried two more experiments. Experiment #1 was to post an anti-Jean Schmidt comment using the nom de plume “Blue-Buckeye”:

Guess what? The comment wasn’t deleted and it’s still online.

For anon’s experiment #2, he returned the next day, Sunday afternoon, August 20, and re-posted his deleted comment threesome:

anon say he checked back a couple hours later and found his Sunday comment was deleted and that comments on the Wulsin page were permanently shut down. Note the last posted comment was from Sunday at 1:07 pm, two hours before anon’s 3:13 pm post:

Was the censorship at Firedoglake limited to the live chat Wulsin event? Not according to a conservative blogger I found in a quick Google search:

*FireDogLake edits and deletes comments they don’t agree with

*FireDogLake suppresses free expression

Has anyone else had similar experiences at Firedoglake? Does Firedoglake routinely delete comments that don’t adhere to a party line?

Here at the Beacon we have a policy of deleting only those comments which contain physical threats, extreme profanity, or are virulently racist or anti-Semitic. We don’t screen for political opinions. Jane Hamsher criticized the Washington Post for deleting legitimate political comments and rightly so. It was wrong when the Post did so and it’s wrong when Firedoglake does it.

Criticizing others for censorship while sending the political speech of others down the memory hole has me thinking of Orwell. To paraphrase a line from “Animal Farm,” at Firedoglake all comments are equal, but some comments are more equal than others.

* “Malariotherapy” is a widely-discredited medical theory that a patient suffering from one disease can be cured by infecting the patient with malaria. Since the early 1980s, Cincinnati’s Dr. Henry J. Heimlich has claimed “malariotherapy” can cure a variety of diseases, including Lyme disease, cancer, and AIDS. Dr. Heimlich’s offshore human experiments in Mexico and China have denounced by the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, leading immunologists including Dr. Anthony Fauci and bioethicists including Dr. Peter Lurie of Public Citizen. Mark Harrington of the AIDS activist organization, Treatment Action Group, said, “Malaria has never worked for anything...If Heimlich is really doing this, he should be put in jail.” (For more information on Heimlich and “malariotherapy,” visit CIRCARE’s bioethics website or check this keyword search )

** Dr. Wulsin’s suggestion that I get the report directly from the Heimlich Institute is disingenuous since, as she knows, the Heimlich Institute has had no employees and has been shuttered since Spring 2005.

*** Howie Klein, a former music industry executive, conducted the Wulsin interview. Klein runs a blog with the subtle moniker “DownWithTyranny,” which recently published this Those who find Klein’s article long on gush, but short on facts about Dr. Wulsin may wish to start with her March 2003 CV.

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