Excerpts of the Media's Failings [According to World War Z]

Okay, so I get that World War Z is not real, but there are some pretty good points about the way the media works (especially in a crisis). I get it. Part of the problem in World War Z was that the United States didn't really have any cases of the dead coming back to life during the beginning of the outbreak. So it really, really seemed like someone else's problem. You know. Like certain earthquakes, floods, or genocides that are occurring right now.

Or even when certain things are occurring on our shores:

Yeah. Five months ago would have put that..... right around June. Great.

In World War Z,  fictional previous chief of staff defends the administration for not acting more decisively against the outbreak, saying (pg 59):

"Can you imagine what America would have been like if the federal government slammed on the brakes every time some paranoid crackpot cried 'wolf' or 'global warming' or 'living dead'? Please. What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment."

 And really, don't expect the media to do...much of anything (pg 62):

"The 'media'? You mean those networks that are owned by some of the largest corporations in the world, corporations that would have taken a nosedive if another panic hit the stock market? That media?.....

[on alternative news sources] Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted, 'The Dead Are Walking,' the more most real Americans tuned them out."

This definitely would have been the attitude of the Bush administration. 

Later, a woman recounts what it was like when the outbreak reached America and the Panic started (pg 122):

"You couldn't find a channel with anything but zombie news, either live images or recorded footage from Yonkers. Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in depth' than the lats one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do."

  Does that sound like any news media you know? Maybe the one leading up to the Iraq War, maybe the one on September 11, 2001? Or maybe Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

Honestly, if there's one thing that unites all Americans, it that we all think that the news media sucks. We just disagree on why it sucks.

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Only I Can Talk About Media Studies That Way!

       He was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200K Dartmouth BA in "media studies" might have been available through a free trial subscription to The Atlantic Monthly and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for fifty dollars a month. His daughter's dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he'd accrued previous to the sale of Knack.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, Page 117 of the Hardcover First Edition

 

You know how its okay if you make fun of your family, but when you hear other people do it, you feel completely and totally incensed? Actually, there are a lot of things like that. And its totally okay. And generally, people accept that as the way life is, unless of course your name is Dr. Laura. Its only okay when I make fun of my major (and the other people in it).

And I also know that the opinions of the characters do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author, but does media studies need to go into quotation marks? Seriously? This is generally why when people ask what my degree is in, I just say "I got a degree in Communications," and leave it at that...at least I didn't go to Dartmouth to get the degree.

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