Zombie CSU (54 page)

In some countries, the authorities can control what the press says and what (and when) they can report certain news. In Great Britain, a D-Notice (also called DA-Notice) is often issued for stories tied to national defense.
³
In criminal trials, the press is advised not to run stories once a case is sub judice (or, under judgment) based on the belief that public comment such as newspaper articles may influence the fair process of the trial. In America, the First Amendment, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, allows for freedom of the press (except in matters of security), and the Freedom of Information Act requires that government information be made available to the public (again, except in matters of security). There are several classifications of information that are not available for either the press or the public, and the government separates them according to sensitivity: confidential, secret, and top secret. There are rumors among the conspiracy theory crowd that there are a number of levels above top secret, which is both reasonable and likely.

I asked my journalism experts how reporters would respond to attempts by authorities to control a situation such as a plague outbreak (with or without zombies).

Student says, “Authorities can, and sometimes do, ask for a delay off-the-record. Through court order, they conceivably can inhibit something that affects an ongoing case or puts the life of an agent/officer at-risk. Some news agencies run stories anyway depending on their assessment of the situation and if it is indeed life-threatening information. Policies vary newsroom-to-newsroom and editor-to-editor.”

“If the government had the story,” Viets says, “they wouldn’t release it at all, they’d cover it up to prevent a panic. And by ‘panic’ I mean folks canceling everything, disrupting trade, impacting the stock market, damaging the flow of commerce. It isn’t people running screaming through the streets that’s the problem, it’s the economy collapsing because of panic. Remember what happened during 9/11—everything got canceled, from air traffic (which you can understand) to church services and day-care (which is a bit extreme). Most likely the government, instead of trying to block the press, would just feed them some story they cooked up. They say it was a SARS scare, or something like that.”

Small-town reporter Barr adds, “Well, of course they can say ‘don’t print that story’ but in reality it is up to the editor and publisher whether or not a story will run. That is the beauty of the First Amendment. Now, it may forever damage the credibility of that newspaper in the eyes of said authorities, but if the story is important enough, a strong editor will take the heat and do what is right.”

Viets adds, “I worked at the
Post Dispatch
during the release of the Pentagon Papers. The government tried to keep us from releasing them by taking us to court, citing ‘National Security,’ but it didn’t work. On the other hand you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, so if the press is going to run a story they’d better make sure of their facts first.”

The Zombie Effect

I asked my journalism experts to comment on how the press would handle a news tip that the dead were rising.

Barr remarks, “That’s a tough one because of the disbelief factor intrinsic to the story itself. I’m not in Pittsburgh…so, zombies in Houghton, Michigan? Nearly everyone’s first reaction would be to roll their eyes and go ‘yeah, right.’ However, a bored, but open-minded reporter would probably make a few inquiries, maybe interview the initial tipster and definitely try to get photos. If the tip panned out to be real, the whole community would be going nuts. I was taking a break from journalism when 9/11 happened and was working at a police/fire station in a town of about 13,000 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is about as far from New York and Washington as you can get culturally. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who called and said something like ‘There’s an Arab walking down Ludington Street.’ I replied, ‘So?’ and they said, ‘Well, go arrest him. He’s probably one of them terrorists.’ It was just nuts. Fortunately, law enforcement kept their heads through all the nonsense.”

Viets points out that the more fantastic news stories are often investigated just to break up boredom during slow stretches. “August is the ideal time to have weird things happen, ’cause nothing happens in August. That’s when we’ll go the extra mile to look into something oddball; that’s when we’ll drive out to the boonies to check out someone who called to say he saw a UFO—which always turned out to be swamp gas. I’d be heading out to the middle of nowhere with a cursing photographer hoping for something I could write about.”

“If the reports were in any way reliable, or even potentially reliable the press would be all over it,” Student assures.

Zach Martini, a freelance wire service reporter agrees, “If reporters heard the dead were rising they’d rush the story, grab it, squeeze every drop out it. Not just for glory—most reporters aren’t really as cynical as we’re sometimes portrayed. Jaded, maybe, but not completely heartless. We’d know that this was information that had to get out to the public. Especially if this was a national emergency. Lives would depend on the story getting out, and unless the Emergency Broadcast Network was kicked in—and when’s the last time you ever heard of that? Not even during 9/11—it would fall to the press to keep the public informed.”

In films like
Dawn the Living Dead
and its sequels, journalists are often depicted as unethical and disordered, providing outdated lists of shelters and safe zones just so they’d have something to report. I asked the reporters to talk about the efficiency of the modern reporter and how he or she would be able to stay on top of the story and as a result serve the public’s need for reliable information.

Martini scoffs. “I saw those films and it pissed me off. Maybe you get a few total jackasses in the business, but there would be a mutiny if our news director was churning out false information like that. And we’d all be complicit in conspiracy and probably twenty other crimes. No, we’d send someone out to do a field report, and if a shelter became contaminated then
that
becomes the breaking news item. That would be what we’d need to tell the people right away.”

Viets agrees. “The list of shelters would be news, no doubt; but more to the point the editors would
never
allow that kind of stuff to go out. Despite the bad PR the press often gets most of the people I’ve known in the 25 years I was a reporter were basically fair. You give out the wrong info knowingly and that will really come back to bite you.”

“That’s a tough one because modern newspapers aren’t all that much different than they were fifty years ago,” Barr says. “They are pretty much a very ethical bunch with a few bad apples. However, television coverage has changed dramatically thanks to the likes of Fox News and other media outlets that go for the shock factor. I don’t know that is so much an ethics problem as the need to be the most outrageous in order to attract viewers. Humans love a good ol’ fashioned bloodbath, and I mean that in all seriousness. It gives them something to talk about. Remember when someone posted the photos of the bodies following Princess Diana’s crash? Millions of people said, ‘How gross, how terrible, what an invasion of privacy.’ Then, probably half of them looked at the photos. A good reporter will always try to balance the
ick
factor with common decency, but in a story that is sensational by its very nature, i.e., zombies, it would be very difficult not to come off sounding like the now-defunct
Weekly World News
. This is why having well spoken, honest officials on the record would be so important.”

Student sees the matter as being multifaceted: “Deadlines and circumstance sometimes create a subset of ethics that are outside of what one might learn in J-school or follow as company policy. Basically, a reporter has to sometimes balance the information against what its implications are and what he/she can weed out through common sense. I have no doubt that some editors would want the reporter to actually have seen a zombie attack before reporting it as such, some would actually wait to pick up the story—especially in the days of the short-scoop (with the Web, as soon as you post info, it’s everyone’s story attributed to you, not just yours)—instead of running it first without conviction, confirmation, substantiation and attribution.”

I asked the reporters about the newspaper headline from
Day of the Dead
, “The Dead Walk.” Did that sound like a reasonable headline for a crisis of this kind? Viets assured me it was. “Absolutely. I worked for two editors who would go out of their way to run the corniest headline they could.”

Student thought that it should have been tweaked: “Not if they are attacking people and eating their brains. You’d have something like DEAD ATTACK LIVING or ‘ZOMBIE’ MURDERS. Something more immediate and less vague but still sensational.”

Viet points out that the wording of the headline depends a lot on the style of each paper. “If the
New York Times
,
The New York Daily Post
, and the
Daily News
all reported a zombie rising you’d have different styles. The
Times
would probably lead with something like EXPERTS BELIEVE THE DEAD MAY BE RETURNING TO LIFE. Something carefully worded; whereas the
Daily News
might actually run THE DEAD WALK, or maybe something even a little funny.”

I asked my reporters if there was an ongoing conflict with the living dead, would reporters volunteer to become embedded with the military who are responding to the crisis? Just about all of them said yes, quickly and emphatically.

“Of course!” says Barr. “I can think of at least four or five reporters with whom I worked in my 10-year career who would have jumped at the opportunity to do something like that, myself included.”

Student agreed wholeheartedly. “Sure. The profession, despite its relative shortcomings in salary and glamour, is filled with people who want to tell a (true) story that the world reads and remembers. This is an opportunity to write that story.”

And Martini added, “Pardon the joke, but I’d
kill
for a story like that. You’d get out there on the front lines and you’d be reporting news that no one else has and you’d be making a difference, maybe even saving lives.”

Viets sees it a little differently: “The young reporters looking to make a name for themselves would. The older guys would be happy to let them.”

In related news…Just as the
Daily Show
with Jon Stewart is a fake news program that is nonetheless regarded as the best place to find the truth, the ZombieWorldNews (www.zombieworldnews.com) is the best place to find up-to-the-minute news stories about the living dead.

Created by Keith Harrop, ZombieWorldNews looks exactly like a straight-shooting Internet news site, with reporting from the field, stand ups by correspondents, and convincingly dry news articles about everything from zombie physiology to zombie disposal methods.

I asked Harrop about how ZombieWorldNews got started. “It actually started as one of those conversations me and my wife have after a bottle of wine. They always start with ‘Hey, you know what would be a reeeaaalllly good idea?’ Well, this was it. We try to approach it in the spirit of a real newscast. Which is difficult, because I am from the UK but have lived in the US for the last 20 years. So I have this mixed idea of what news media should be like. I have the droll, stoic delivery of the BBC and then the sensational, dramatic approach of CNN.”

What’s the ZombieWorldNews’s approach: “There are too many Zombie movies that are just plain dumb. And the people who watch them deserve better. I committed from the beginning several things, they were—(A) not to dumb down the concept. (B) Not to satirize current events. (C) Not to sensationalize. (D) To pace the stories, even to the point where on some days mediocre events happened.”

It seems like a lot of work for one guy. Harrop says, “I was just going to throw a couple of news items a month up on the site. But as it started to get popular I realized I had to really commit to this or it just would not work. As I started to write it, all sorts of issues and ideas started to come up. I had to recognize the human element. Ethics, politics, science and medicine. How do you dispose of a dead body? There must be rules, even in times like these. Is a Zombie clinically dead even? Where is its soul? Should it have some basic rights? How does human nature’s natural tendency towards paranoia emerge in non-plague areas? What do we do with quarantine victims? Immigration?”