We have arrived at the conclusion of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion.I have to express my condolence's to his wife and children for their loss of husband and father,He was a true American hero.I also would like to voice my disgust with his treacherous editors who sold him out.This story here woke up a lot of Americans to the Pravda trio of the Washington Post,and New York and LA Times,as nothing more then state mouthpieces,which all 3 remain to this very day...damn sad...

....Unlike all the previous stories about the Contras and cocaine, this one couldn't be killed off in the traditional manner, by Big Media ignoring it or relegating it to the news briefs. Millions of people were finding out about "Dark Alliance" anyway—even though not a word had appeared in the so-called national press. That phenomenon was newsworthy by itself.

"The story has serious legs, moving rapidly through the African American community via e-mail and file downloads, and then into living rooms, offices and churches, and onto streets and into more mainstream black papers and radio broadcasts," HotWired magazine wrote in October 1996. "For the first time, my grandmother asked to go online and read something. I couldn't believe it. She wouldn't look at a computer before," one black government lawyer e-mailed the magazine. "This story is causing a sensation among blacks. It's all they're talking about. They are enraged about it and they can't believe it isn't on every front page in America."

"Dark Alliance," Hot Wired wrote, "is making digital and media history. The Mercury News is demonstrating for perhaps the first time how the Web and the traditional press can fuse to good effect—and that there's still a chance to break modern media's parochial instincts and return some power to journalists outside of Washington and New York. . .. The story may alter black consciousness about the Net, and further the Web's reputation as a powerful—and serious— information medium." The Associated Press noted that "while no one has been able to track specific numbers of blacks who might have come online because of the Mercury News series, many feel it has been a watershed event."

A Boston Globe reporter arrived in Los Angeles in early October 1996 and breathlessly reported that the story was "pulsing through L.A.'s black neighborhoods like a shockwave, provoking a stunning, growing level of anger and indignation. Talk-radio stations with predominantly black audiences are deluged with calls on the subject. Demonstrations, candle-lighting ceremonies and town-hall meetings are becoming regular affairs. And people on the street are heatedly discussing the topic."

If there was one thing scarier to corporate journalism than the series itself, it was the image of a future where Big Media was unable to control the national agenda. Irrespective of what the series said, "Dark Alliance" proved that the stranglehold a relative few East Coast editors and producers had on what became news could be broken. "This story suddenly raises suspicions that the Internet has changed the equation in support of democracy," author Daniel Brandt ruminated in October 1996 on an Internet e-zine. "Unless regional newspapers agree to mild-mannered, regional interest Web sites, all the resources that the elites have invested in monopolizing the Daily Spin could end up spinning down the drain."

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/09/part-15-of-15-dark-alliancea-very.html