RIFLE RANGE BOY: All you need is a pretty face and the media.

Just to drive home the point of how media sells ideas and influences our way of thinking, look at Elizabeth Holmes's case. At 19, she dropped out of Stanford in 2003 with a one-tracked mind to prove to the world that her painless blood-testing device was going to revolutionise laboratory blood testing. Equipped with only computer knowledge without a medical background, she proceeded with her plan despite the detractors' scepticism. From the get-go, she was faced with opposition from the senior partners and staff employed in her company, Theranos.

Through the benefit of her charm and goodwill, Holmes' company managed to secure close to $6 million in funds through crowdsourcing. The trouble was that the machine that Holmes was selling was not working. It gave wrong results most of the time, and the company ended up using other devices to do the tests instead. Workers who complained of its unreliability were sacked and were required to sign non-disclosure agreements to safeguard company secrets.

The young lassie was actually committing fraud on a large scale. Her reputation, on the contrary, was flying sky high. Her work appeared on TV channels, and her pretty face adorned front covers of business magazines. The fact that senior politicians and Clinton Foundation endorsed her work just added its value. At one time, Theranos was valued at $9 billion. In 2015, the Theranos machine even got FDA approval.

It took a Wall Street Journal journalist and a disgruntled former laboratory director to bring the company's unsafe and unethical practice to the fore. Slowly the investors pulled out, then came the court trials, then the sentencing. Holmes was barred from positions of power in any public company for 10 years.

The media still made a killing. They ran hours of the court cases' footage, interviews with so-called 'experts' on relevant topics related to the Theranos scandal. It went on till the next news that raised the curiosity of the public surfaced.

All you need is a pretty face, a convincing story with a gift of the gap and media coverage, you can sell ice to Eskimos.