Thanks to the Internet, for instance, it is no longer just a few big media conglomerates who talk to the many...
...It is true even in the most developed societies. Forbes magazine - hardly an advocate of the know-nots - ran a very smart piece in July 1998 after Time Warner-CNN's disatrous June 7, 1998, report that U.S. Green Berets had deliberately nerve-gassed turncoats in Laos in 1970. No sooner did the program air than U.S. Army veterans alleged that this so-called expose about Operation Tailwind was based on spurious reporting and dubious sources. Despite numerous complaints, the global news giant CNN would not retract the story. (Global news giants don't apologize to anyone, especially to some retired soldiers.)
"Time Warner may have expected the resulting anger to subside" noted Forbes. "{But,} fighting mad, Vietnam vets mobilized on the internet - the only medium easily available to them. Without the Internet it would have taken months to dig up the facts - and by then few would have much cared. 'It allowed me to do in three days what {CNN producer} April Oliver did in eight months,' says Air Force Major General (retired) Perry Smith, CNN's military consultant, who quit the network in protest over the show, then helped rebut it. Smith says the night the showed aired he dashed off a list of questions about what really happened in Laos. Simply by pressing a button, he dispatched the questions to over 300 of his best sources - 'my email brain trust,' explains Smith. 'The emails started flying from all over'" Tailwind was classified top secret, so had the Vietnam vets had to wait for the Pentagon bureaucracy to decide whether or not to declssify information they needed to refure CNN, the furor over the story would have passed. But by using an email network, which cost them almost nothing, they were able to assemble on their own all the testimony they needed from soldiers who were on the scene at the time, and then stick it in CNN's face in a matter of days.
In the end, the email-armed veterans, living off pensions, forced CNN's high-priced president, Rick Kaplan, to go on his own network, looking like a pathetic deer caught in the headlights, disown his own story and abjectly apologise over and over again in order to save his own job and restore some credibilty to his network. The final score: Vietnam Veterans with email, 1. Time Warner-CNN, the world's largest media conglomerate, 0.
