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This is something that people like to spew, but the DJIA has two nice properties that make it worth referencing sometimes.

(1) Its correlation with the S&P 500 is insanely high. So, just using it as a proxy for the S&P is fine.

(2) We've tracked the DJIA going back over a hundred years, so that data is readily available.

Overall, the S&P 500 is a better index, but criticizing someone for using it in their analysis isn't worth the distraction from their actual thesis.

Here's the Nasdaq chart, '73 to Feb 2015: http://i.imgur.com/gyyQtae.png

Have you looked at the S&P 500 chart for the time period in question?

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq have the same shape.