The military/federal chain of command may have botched the staged Air Force One NYC flyover earlier this year, but the crisis communications assessement the military did in the hours and days after is a nice demonstration of how 360 degrees of major and citizen media can sometimes call power to account (especially when they screw up in broad frigging daylight):

A U.S. Northern Command document offers this “assessment” of the story: “Last 4 hours: Story reported quickly. Covered by AP, CNN, FOX major news outlets. Local reporting very critical, highlighting ‘scare’ factor. Local populace very critical of event, due to 9-11 sensitivities.”
It continues: “Web site blog comments ‘furious’ at best. Twitter search reveals ‘tweets’ regarding two F-16’s chasing commercial airliner. Rate of 1 tweet per minute and growing.”
“No positive spin is possible. Admit mistake,” it concludes.

From CNN.com article. Also nice to know that the military, who invented the Internet, knows how to refer to twitter properly.

Yeah, that’d probably scare me too. Makes you want to look around to see if Bill Pullman or Kiefer Sutherland is somewhere nearby. Sheesh. Washington Post has a PDF of all 146 DoD photos here…