Crack Cocaine in the Neighborhood

the field negro: No love for the Gipper.does a great post about former President Ronald Reagan's connection to crack cocaine into African-American neighborhoods. Field Negro reminds us of how the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist Gary Webb in his investigation report called "Dark Alliance" used the African- American news outlets and the Internet to get out information about crack cocaine. Webb's investigative report on the flooding of crack cocaine on the streets of California was attacked by mainstream media :

The wildfire-like sweep of "Dark Alliance" was all the more remarkable because it took place without the tinder of the mainstream press. Instead, the story roared through the new communications media of the Internet and black talk radio--two distinct, but in this case somewhat symbiotic, information channels. With the Internet, as Webb put it. "you don't have be the New York Times or the Washington Post to bust a national story anymore."

Understanding this media reality, Mercury Center, the Mercury News's sophisticated online service, devoted considerable staff time to preparing for simultaneous online publishing of the "Dark Alliance" stories on the World Wide Web. In the online version, many of the documents cited in the stories were posted on the Mercury Center site, hyperlinked to the story; audio recordings from wiretaps and hearings, follow-up articles from the Mercury News and elsewhere, and, for a time, even Gary Webb's media schedule were also posted

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Sounds like a little Afrospear...