FR - .... per official policy, expressed in 2004 by the owner as: "we feel no compelling need to allow [liberals] a platform to promote their repugnant and obnoxious propaganda from our forum. Free Republic is not a liberal debating society." The owner reserves the right to revoke posting privileges and exclude any individual without recourse.
DU - Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are generally supportive of progressive ideals and support Democratic candidates for political office.
Although there is nothing factually wrong with either of the above statements, and although both websites have pretty much the same policies regarding membership, there is a major difference in the slant applied to the essential facts about the membership policies. While FR "excludes" and "revokes" and gives "no recourse" to their victims, DU on the other hand is simply a "progressive" club with an innocuous "restricted membership".
Also note that while FR tosses people they don't like out the door, there is no mention of DU doing that, implying they must have figured out some way of never letting those kinds of people join in the first place.
Yeah, right.
Furthermore, the FR people use pejoratives against their victims like "repugnant" and "obnoxious," but DU's statements regarding membership restrictions must have never, ever, ever, ever contained any negative words about people who they won't allow to join. Or at least not in the time span going back to 2004, which is how far they went to find an FR quote.
Liberal bias & spin like this are so all-pervasive that we miss seeing it most of the time, sometimes even when we're LOOKING for it. The subtle stuff can be especially hard to spot, unless you can manage to do apple-to-apple comparisons of statements side-by-side like above.
A classic example of this:
Report on a political debate, version 1:
The Republican stated ......
His Democratic opponent answered with ....
The Republican answered that with ....
The Democrat answered that with ...
Report on the exact same political debate, version 2:
The Republican claimed that ......
But his Democratic opponent pointed out that ....
Then the Republican claimed that .....
But the Democrat refuted that with ....
membership privileges between the FR and DU articles on Wikipedia:
FR - .... per official policy, expressed in 2004 by the owner as: “we feel no compelling need to allow [liberals] a platform to promote their repugnant and obnoxious propaganda from our forum. Free Republic is not a liberal debating society.” The owner reserves the right to revoke posting privileges and exclude any individual without recourse.
DU - Its membership is restricted by policy to those who are generally supportive of progressive ideals and support Democratic candidates for political office.
So why doesn’t someone go on the web site and CHANGE it? :)