Noah Oppenheim & Michael Schmidt on ‘Zero Day’ and the War for Truth in the Disinformation Age

Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt have spent their careers reporting on politics, national security, and other thorny subjects—Oppenheim as the former president of NBC News and Schmidt as a reporter for The New York Times. But in "Zero Day," their new Netflix thriller which hit the streamer this weekend, they step into the world of fiction, telling a story about a cyber crisis that threatens to unravel the country.

In a conversation with Status, the two discussed what it was like shifting from journalism to scripted storytelling and the eerie ways in which their fictional plot mirrors our current political moment. They also unpacked the responsibility of the news media, the role disinformation plays in shaping the public discourse, and what it takes to tell a story that resonates in an era where shared reality feels increasingly elusive.

Below is the Q&A, edited lightly for style.

Both of you have built careers in journalism, reporting on real-world political intrigue and national security. What was it like stepping into the world of fiction, where you get to shape the story rather than just report on it?

NOAH: I've had the privilege of working in the scripted space a few times before and love the freedom it offers.  In a fictional story you can just go so much deeper.  In this case, we were lucky to partner with one of the best, Eric Newman, who made “Narcos,” among other great shows.  All of us wanted to tell a story that was both entertaining but also felt real.  We leaned a lot on our old sources in politics and national security to be sure that it did.

MIKE: This was my first rodeo in this space. I saw the project as a new way to try to tell the stories that I tell in the newspaper. Since I arrived in Washington over a decade ago, I had heard we could face a cyber–Pearl Harbor. For many years, dating back before Joe Biden, I felt the potentially declining acuity of our aging leaders was really important. Those are hard hypothetical stories to capture in print. But in a television show, you can really explore them, and they connect differently.

How much did you pull from real-world media figures or political leaders when creating your characters? It seems like there are quite a few parallels between what we see in the show and what we see in our world today.

NOAH: We started work on this four years ago and it's been surreal to see story beats that we thought were flights of fancy, actually play out in the news. But that's definitely not because we're so good at seeing the future. If anything, it's because some themes are just timeless: The fight over truth. How far powerful people will go if they think they're acting on behalf of a righteous cause. How willing ordinary people are to give up their rights and freedoms when they're scared. How extreme wealth impacts the health of a democracy.

MIKE: Over long careers in journalism, you accumulate in your notebook a range of different stories, characters, anecdotes and larger questions that fascinate you. When you’re then allowed to write fiction, you can’t help but want to pull disparate pieces from them to create the amalgamation that turns into your story.

How does the show depict the power struggle between traditional institutions—government, intelligence agencies, etcetera—and newer, less accountable forces shaping public discourse, such as media influencers?

NOAH:  Our show kicks off with a massive cyberattack, but that's not the greatest danger the characters confront. The real threat, to all of us, is the large ecosystem of voices that are constantly flooding our public discourse with their own facts and understanding of reality, completely unrestrained by any oversight or set of standards.   We can't deal with any of our problems—cyber, nuclear, climate, whatever keeps you up at night—so long as we can't agree on what's true and what's not.

MIKE: The story is a fictional cut at the question of the moment: how can we live in a functional society where there is no shared truth? Noah, Eric and I—who all have backgrounds that both overlap and are different—strongly agree this is one of the biggest—if not biggest—problems of our time. We need to find new ways to tell that story and raise that issue. None of us have a singular answer but hopefully a show like this can start a conversation.

We live in an age where disinformation thrives. I’m curious: At whose feet do you put most of the blame? Is it the disinformation artists who profit off lies and conspiracy theories? Is it the Big Tech deities who constructed algorithmic systems that can be easily exploited by bad faith actors? Or the media bosses who reward conflict and entertainment in news rather than resolution and policy? Or is it a chunk of society that would rather hear from voices that cater to their views than grapple with complex issues?

NOAH:  All of the above! Of course, not equally, but there's enough blame to go around. In some ways, the easiest lies to confront are the outright lies, consciously disseminated by bad actors, for malicious purposes. Far more pernicious are the subtle distortions perpetrated by people and institutions that can credibly insist they deal in facts. The problem is you can omit facts. You can emphasize facts that serve your agenda—or make your audience feel good—and deemphasize those that don't. As we say in the show, there's a difference between the facts and the truth.

MIKE: I’m not sure. What I do know is that, for some reason, at some point in the past several decades, wanting to see the world for what it actually is, became far less appealing than mining the world for only those facts that back up your argument or preconceived views. That to me is the fundamental problem.

The concept of truth is really at the center of this show. It’s also at the center of our current political moment. You have both, I’m sure, thought considerably about how to get fact-based reporting to audiences. What’s the best approach? Is it possible in today's age to have fact-based reporting resonate with most of the country? Or is the concept of shared reality a relic of the past?

NOAH:  I worry that like a lot of intractable challenges, it's a problem of both supply and demand. There are not enough institutions out there producing responsible, fact-based reporting. But time and again, news consumers have demonstrated that's not necessarily what they want. Technology amplifies this problem and the algorithm worsens it, but audiences do have choices. And they increasingly choose to consume only the narratives that make them feel good. I feel most hopeful about some of the new media organizations sprouting up, which both act in good faith, but also openly acknowledge the filter through which they view the world. The path back to a shared reality may be more people realizing almost every news story is an imperfect reflection of underlying events, more news organizations doing their best to convey what their biases are, and consumers then doing the hard work of building their understanding of the world from multiple sources. But it ain't easy.

MIKE: It’s a complex problem because on one hand I don’t think that the media has ever done a better job at quickly capturing the moment, turning it into digestible story telling, and easily and quickly reaching millions of people. At the same time, a fact-based view of the world seems to be less appealing than ever before. If I was in charge of one of these institutions I would lock my six smartest people in a room and tell them not to come out until they’ve solved it.

Is it easier today to get a message across to an audience through fiction than non-fiction? Were there moments where you thought, “We could never write this in a news story, but it works for a script”?

NOAH: Everyone watches Netflix, all over the world, so it's a far less polarized distribution landscape. Our primary goal was to entertain. If we happen to reach an ideologically diverse audience and provoke some thought around these issues, that's just an added bonus.

MIKE: I guess I won’t know until this project has hit the world for sometime to see what the reaction has been to this and seen if it sparks any discussion. I know what it’s like to write a story that breaks through. I know what it’s like to write a story that doesn’t. Now, I’m learning what that may or may not look like in terms of a television show.