This past week has been big for online zombie searches. Following a genuinely gruesome face eating attack by a disturbed (to say the least) man in Florida “zombie apocalypse” became the third most popular search term online. The original Florida story was soon followed by equally horrid headlines from New Jersey, Maryland, and Canada. As these stories seemed to rapidly accumulate from out of nowhere the Center for Disease Control was compelled to issue this statement.
“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead," said CDC spokesman David Daigle, adding: "(or one that would present zombie-like symptoms.)"
Only last year they had used the term zombie apocalypse in a tongue-in-cheek teaser for publicity about emergency preparedness.
Also as a result of the ebb and flow of search- hungry traffic, the humor site Cracked.com (the self described; sort of popular comedy website that publishes silly, informative list articles {garnished with dick jokes}) had its best days for traffic ever. This traffic spike, according to senior Cracked.com writer Daniel O’Brian, shows the media is seriously broken.
One insane news story catches everyone's attention with an impossible to ignore headline ("Man Shot to Death by Police While Attempting to Eat Another Man's Face").Once that happens, any online journalist hungry for traffic is going to look for similar stories around the world (of which there are always plenty, because there will always be disturbed people in the world), and try to find a link between their story and the crazy popular Miami story. Because then they're not just running a story about "a man in Maryland who ate another man's heart and brains," they're writing a story titled "Another Trend in the Bizarre ZOMBIE EPIDEMIC THAT'S SWEEPING AMERICA!"
That's just smart journalism. You hitch your story to a more popular story and try to connect them. This doesn't mean that people weren't murdering and/or eating people in horrific ways two years ago; it just means we weren't looking for that kind of story back then.
However the New York Times – safely behind a pay wall – hardly reported on the original story and didn’t use the “Z” world at all. But check out O’Brian’s entire rant – it isn’t totally cracked.