Dead Line News

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Reporter: “This is Fort McMurray burning, We’re right in the thick of it. To be honest, I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to stay here...”

"Beep, Good Evening. Slate Sanchez's phone here reporting from the demolition site. Slate and the rest of the Action News team don't have AT&T, which means no bars out here on the outskirts of town. So we didn't get that call about the new blast zone -- which is now here, instead of way over there. I'm Slate Sanchez, and I'm about to be The News!"

—AT&T phone commercial

Sometimes, an anchor in a newsroom or (more likely) on the scene becomes the news. While reporting the chaos caused by a monster attacking the Capital City or the destructive force of some sort of massive natural or supernatural disaster or another kind of dangerous situation, he or she happens to fall victim to that very event he or she was reporting on.

In many cases, right before this trope is invoked, the audience will get some clue foreshadowing the reporter's fate: a strange noise in the distance, for example. We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties often follows.

A subtrope of Apocalyptic Log and Ignored Vital News Reports. Often overlaps with Red Shirt Reporter if the reporter is reporting on-scene and dies. Not related to Spinning Paper. See also The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Dead Line News include:

Anime and Manga

  • In an anime-only episode of Ranma ½, a reporter in the mountains talks of how a sabertooth tiger and a pterodactyl (both accidentally created by Ranma, Ryoga and Mousse) have been terrorizing the region. As he speaks, the sabertooth comes into the screen, grins at him as he realises what is sitting next to him, then lunges as the screen goes blank... much to the discomfort of Ranma, currently watching from around the corner back at the Tendo Dojo.
  • A non-comedic usage: In Paranoia Agent, a news anchor is reporting on the mysterious wave of destruction proceeding through Tokyo when it engulfs him.
  • Dragonball Z, when Cell makes his first appearance.
    • And when he's waiting until his tournament starts. The entire military goes to beat him, and he kills them all. The reporter in question is in a helicopter and is vaporized in the blast.
    • Also happens in Dragonball Kai when Vegeta and Nappa come to Earth - the hapless reporters get taken out after Vegeta forbids Nappa from wiping out the ZKai Fighters.

Nappa: I HATE THE MEDIAAAAAAA!

  • Something similar happens in Puni Puni Poemy where whenever a female reporter tries to report on Puni Puni Poemy sightings, she is dragged almost-all-the-way offscreen by someone.
  • A reporter is eaten on camera (though off screen) at the end of the second episode of Highschool of the Dead.
  • When a Utahraptor gets loose in a TV studio in Dinosaur King, the anchor giving the report (from the studio in question), in a moment of Genre Savvy, mentions that she'll be giving regular reports assuming she hasn't been eaten.
  • In volume one of Biomega, a news anchor blows his head clean off on-air when a barrage of world-altering bio-weapons are launched into the atmosphere. The weapons didn't go off anyway.


Comic Books

  • Used in an issue of Marvel Adventures: Avengers. A reporter brings a camera crew out into the jungles of Darkest Africa to report on an insanely insular country. The page is shot from the camera's perspective, and you can see Sabertooth crouching menacingly. Cut to the Avengers discussing the cut-off broadcast. This being Marvel Adventures, the reporter and crew got rescued by that same insular country.
  • In the Avengers story-arc "Ultron Unlimited", the villainous robot laid waste to a small European country, and reporters on the scene don't go unnoticed. "Oh look, a human camera crew..." Needless to say, the screen goes to static pretty soon.
  • The Batman comic The Man Who Laughs feature the Joker's first meeting with Batman. He appears when a reporter is covering the re-opening of a renovated Arkham Asylum. He kills the reporter with Joker Venom (echoing the death of the news anchor in the Burton film), then holds the camera man at gunpoint so he films him as he delivers his message. He then shoots the cameraman.
  • One of Ghost Rider's 90s issues had this as a "most shocking ending ever".
    • And new series did it with Sin ordering her men to spare TV hellicopter, so hwhole world can see the destruction of Washington. Once she fights Ghost Rider and wins, she says TV crew served their purpose and orders to blow up the helicopter.


Film

  • In Tim Burton's Batman, some news anchors are discussing the Joker's act of chemical terrorism on Gotham, when suddenly a female anchor starts laughing uncontrollably, and then falls over dead with the victims' characteristic grin on her face.
    • In The Dark Knight, newscaster Mike Engel and his crew are covering the hospital evacuations from Gotham General Hospital - the hospital the Joker destroys. He and his crew hastily board one of the school buses evacuating patients and doctors...alas, it's the very bus the Joker arranged to hijack. The Joker, never missing an opportunity, forces them to transmit another message to the city, with Engel reading a statement for him.
  • In The Day After Tomorrow, a reporter is hit by a billboard in the middle of a tornado striking Los Angeles.
  • In Livin Large!, the protagonist gets his big break into news when a reporter is shot by the gunman he was reporting on. He simply grabs his microphone and takes up the job.
  • In the second live-action Scooby Doo movie, the news report on the monsters terrorizing town is interrupted by the Black Knight, and the broadcast suddenly cuts off. Nothing very terrible happened to the reporter, since she was actually the Big Bad in disguise.
  • In Vantage Point the reporter at the start is right at the scene when the president is shot and frantically reports the event and the sound of a distant explosion right before being killed by the bomb in the podium exploding.
  • The small town which is the setting for the movie Gremlins features an omni-present disc jockey whom the audience only hears over various radios; he is attacked by the Gremlins while on the air ("You're not Rockin' Rickey fans!!") but in something of a subversion he survives and is back on the air at the end of the movie.
  • In Spider-Man 3, Harry sees a brief news clip of Venom eating the camera immediately before the final battle.
  • Starship Troopers: "This is an ugly planet! A bug planet! A planet hostile to life as we- (Oh Crap face) ...AAAAAAAGHHHH!!!!"
    • Bonus points for his cameraman doing the exact same thing.
  • Shows up several times in the BBC disaster-scenario docu-drama "Day/After".
  • In Countdown to Looking Glass, reporter Mick Boyle is on a ship next to the first nukes going off... which is summarily itself nuked.
  • In the original Godzilla, a radio crew reporting the attack on Tokyo realize they have no way out. Accepting it, they announce this fact to their listeners and continue reporting until Godzilla destroys the tower from which they're broadcasting.
  • A variation occurs in the first installment of The Howling; the female protagonist is a TV reporter who brings her story on the werewolves in the forest back to civilization, and not only turns into a werewolf on live TV, but is eventually shot dead.
  • 2012. Happens to Arnold Schwarzenegger no less—just when the Governator has finished giving a press conference to say everything's going to be all right when the roof falls in on him and California starts sliding into the sea.
    • That wasn't Schwarzengger, that was a poorly dubbed stand in of him.
  • Network is about a disgruntled evening news anchorman who threatens to kill himself on live television (shades of Christine Chubbuck). He eventually does get killed during a broadcast, although not by his own hand.
  • Dawn of the Dead remake: "The president has direct contact with the CDC and head of FEMA. No further quest-OH MY GOD!"
  • Brought up in Happy Hell Night, where a college student is practising for an exposing newscast for the student channel and gets a pickaxe through his head.
  • One of the camera crews reporting on the mysterious meteor strikes in Battle: Los Angeles barely get a few seconds showing strange figures coming out of the water before a missile hits the camera.
  • In The Invisible Maniac, after the title character has killed multiple women whom he stripped topless first if they weren't already naked, the climactic battle leaves the killer's fate ambiguous. But at the end of the film, a female news anchor reporting on the story is suddenly stripped topless by an unseen force and screams...
  • Quarantine: The two leads are doing a "lighter side of the news" piece on life in a firehouse, when their Engine Company gets called to the infected apartment building.


Literature

  • Dave Barry's novel Tricky Business uses this as a running gag. A reporter is on the scene for a story about a boy who was electrocuted by a power line in a flooded suburb of Miami. The reporter and cameraman, who are now themselves standing in the same area, die. A news van and helicopter follow, and the death toll rises as the reporters keep doing the same things that they are advising the audience to avoid. In the epilogue it turns out that the boy whose death they were reporting didn't even die in the first place.
  • In Final Destination: Death of the Senses one of Death's intended victims, a bitchy reporter, gets impaled through both eyes by a large two-pronged icicle that falls on her during a live broadcast.
  • In Stephen King's The Stand, a radio call-in show discussing the government's crackdown on civil liberties during the Captain Trips plague is interrupted by a military squad entering the studio and gunning down the host.
  • Reality TV variant: In World War Z, a mansion full of celebrities, hired mercenary guards and cameramen insist on broadcasting a real-time running account of their efforts to survive the Zombie Apocalypse. They're overrun not by zombies, but by hordes of panicked civilians who saw the broadcast and realized the mansion offered a potential refuge from the undead.
    • Alternately, they were attacking because they were incensed at the celebs' arrogance.
    • Also, during the unmitigated disaster that is the Battle of Yonkers, the large media turnout at what was supposed to be this great victory are instead overrun by zombies when the human forces are thoroughly routed.


Live Action TV

  • Trica Tanaka gets hit by a meteorite on Lost while covering Hugo's chicken shack.
  • This was a common occurrence on The Muppet Show, where a news report would often end with the subject of the report falling on the Newsman in a Slapstick manner.
    • A similar joke in a Muppets comic had Fozzie reporting on a home run during a baseball game the night before. Just as he mentions how the ball sailed over the stadium and just kept going, it hits him in the head.
  • The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica miniseries does this with a group of news reporters being blown away by the nuclear bombs going off all over the colonies.
  • Parodied on The Daily Show during a field report from Stephen Colbert on a baseball player whose bat had shattered during a game, sending bits of wood flying everywhere - one of the shards hit Colbert while he was looking away and pierced his skull. He doesn't seem to have noticed, but the report degenerates into incoherent rambling.
    • This may be a parody of an event that happened in 2000, when Chuck Knoblauch threw a ball into the stands - and hit Keith Olbermann's mother in the face.
  • The final episode of The 4400 shows the NTAC agents watching a news report on the Promicin plague. At one point, the scene cuts to the NTAC agents and later cuts back to show the reporter succumbing to the Promicin plague.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "Turn Left", the BBC keeps covering the spaceship plowing towards Buckingham Palace. Once it hits, the screen goes white... and then Donna sees the mushroom cloud.
    • "Army of Ghosts" has not only the news, but any broadcast program in which the eponymous ghosts are featured suddenly turn into one of these when the ghosts are revealed to be interdimensional Cybermen.
    • Set during the same day as "Army of Ghosts", the online, extra scene for "Doomsday" shows a news report on the ensuing chaos at the hands of the Cybermen and the Daleks. As the reporter speaks, the studio shakes and crumbles. Suddenly, a Dalek appears and approaches her while crying "EXTERMINATE!". The screen goes dead ... and clearly, so does the poor reporter.
    • In The End of Time, Part One, the newsreader and Barack Obama are turned into Master clones on live TV. Of course, so is everyone else, so there's nobody actually watching to be shocked.
  • In an episode of Babylon 5 the news station is stormed by government forces during a live broadcast.
  • Appears in The Goodies, episode "Kitten Kong". Although it's Michael Aspel who gets attacked by the titular beast, so there's pedigree (no pun intended) behind this one.
  • Non-fatal example from The Sarah Jane Adventures: While describing people getting possessed throughout the world, the news reader gets possessed. "I accept the Ancient Lights".
  • A variation occurs in a DVD bonus skit recorded for The Day Today. A reporter who has been pretending to be at the WTC for a trade conference is thrown to re the 9/11 attacks, at which point it becomes apparent he is oblivious as to everything that is happening. In an attempt to cover up, he pretends to be part of the disaster.

Peter: One of the towers... the other tower... the tower I'm in is collapsing! I'm collapsing, Chris, under the sheer... I've managed... I'm out! I'm out!

  • An ongoing joke in Drop the Dead Donkey was how Damian's sensationalist field reports always resulted in his cameraman getting injured.
  • Spike Milligan once did a sketch in which a newsreader announcing the results of a prize draw realises that he has the winning number, and frantically searches his pockets for his ticket.
    • Likewise, Michael Bentine once played a posh BBC announcer reading some soccer results, who completely loses his cool when he realises that he might have won the Pools (a sweepstake based on those results).
    • Similarly, Kent Brockman realizing that he won the lottery with the numbers he just announced.
    • And the lottery episode of Garfield and Friends.
  • One Mitchell and Webb sketch had a brilliant example of this, parodying the trend of news reporters asking the public for their opinions on the news by having them do this when reporting on an unstoppable alien invasion. Though they are eventually obliterated, it's not before they discuss possible results, comment on the progress of the destruction, and open viewer mail.

News Presenter: "Carl from Andville writes 'Where's Doctor Who when you need him? In fiction, I imagine!'....yes, indeed, because we're running out of time both on the program and just generally."

  • A regular skit on 70s Saturday Morning Kids Show Tiswas was 'The News With Trevor McDonut' (named after big-name news anchor Trevor McDonald), which featured Dead Line News stories, inevitably combined with a truly awful pun.
  • During the course of the TV series Life a recurring bit was a documentary filmmaker doing interviews with people about Charlie Crewes (the protagonist). In the last episode, the unseen filmmaker interviews the Big Bad, who explains his motivations and then kills the filmmaker.
  • In the All That spinoff The Amanda Show, They would have a segment called When ______s attack (sometimes hula girls, The Brady Bunch, etc) They would watch the clips of people being attacked and then at the end the subject would attack the newscaster.
  • Parodied in WKRP in Cincinnati's famous episode "Turkeys Away", when the station manager's plan to free twenty turkeys as a Thanksgiving promotion turns out to mean dropping them from a helicopter ("As God is my witness... I thought turkeys could fly.") Les Nessman's breathless report from the scene is cut off mid-sentence when disgusted onlookers attack him, following which the helicopter lands and the surviving turkeys lay into him too.

Les: Oh, no, Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the Humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!

  • In the Made for TV movie Special Bulletin, a reporter is covering the scene where the assault team is attempting to deactivate a terrorist nuclear bomb on a boat in the harbor, mentioning how they're supposed to have over an hour, but not realizing the team has tripped one of the fail-deadlies, arming the mechanism and shortly thereafter, cutting off his report in mid sentence.
    • Even better, the viewers (us) got to see in split-screen with the reporter a live feed from a camera in the compartment with the bomb, as the rad-suited technicians were working on it. Everything's okay, then the voltage across a circuit starts to fluctuate wildly, the technicians become a lot more tense, one of them panics and actually runs away, and then boom.
    • Also, a few minutes later the news network establishes contact with a reporter who was at the impromptou media center across the bay and we get to see what her camerman had recorded: a room full of people just hanging out waiting for someone to come in and give them an official statement, then white-out, then after a secod or so the camera recovers from the overload and shows a view of the room and people on fire, and then the shockwave arrives and the only good thing about it is that it puts out the fire.
  • The made for TV movie Without Warning is depicted as a series of news reports. The final scene as Earth's population centres are summarily bombarded with asteroids, sees the anchorman quoting Shakespeare until an asteroid hits nearby and the picture cuts to static.
  • In Lexx, a Red Shirt Reporter gets Distracted by the Sexy of a 50-foot woman, and dies under her foot.

Anchor: We'll get right back to the scene, courtesy of... someone else. (smiles blandly)


Music

  • Lordi album The Arockalpyse starts with with a news report where at least two reporters in the field are killed by invading demons while talking to the news anchor.


Newspaper Comics

A camera crew from channel nine
Arrived in time to give
A live report
At this they failed
because they didn't live.


Radio

  • In the radio version of War of the Worlds, the news broadcast of the first Martian landing pod is cut short with a gut-wrenching silence. The others don't fare much better.


Trading Cards

  • In Topps' card series Dinosaurs Attack!!, one of the cards displays the anchors who have been framing some of the action being attacked. The back of the card is "technical difficulties, please stand by."


Video Games

  • Alan Wake has an interesting example. Wake has to run from the police (headed by FBI-Agent Nightingale) and the Taken in the middle of a Washingtonian Wilderness' night, and sees the local radio station (headed by a friendly acquaintance) in the distance, and decides to flee there first. On the way, he is able to pick up some random radios and listen to the radio host, live on the air (who in return is called by concerned citizens about the sound of police sirens and gunfire in their neighbourhood, which naturally emanate from Nightingale's posse). When he finally gets to the station and tries to tell the host inside the studio what happened, the police shows up and a drunken Nightingale tries to shoot Wake, even though he is unarmed, and standing inside the tone studio with the radio host right next to him. He misses Wake, but totals the studio in the process. A short time later, the radio host managed to get the programme up and running again, in which he now repeatedly apologises for the incident and raves about Nightingale's recklessness (seeing how he was nearly shot by him). He does so for a few days.
  • Basically the entirety of Michigan: Report From Hell, where up to 6 reporters will be hurled into the maw of a waiting Eldritch Abomination throughout the game, as the cameraman (i.e. the player) films their reports. The best ending seems to require getting all the money shots.
  • Everyone's favorite reporter (Kahlisah Al-Jalani) from Mass Effect can end up getting punched out by the person she insists on pestering.
    • In the same universe, in a Twitter feed run by BioWare as a prologue to Mass Effect 3, Emily Wong (the more reputable Intrepid Reporter) was on Earth reporting on the failure of the Sol System's comm buoys when the Reapers attacked. She died... driving her news van in a kamikaze attack on a Reaper after basically everybody else she was with was dead.
  • Condemned 2: Bloodshot has a reporter being captured by a cult. The reporter apparently thinks that it's his duty to report no matter what, because he talks about the cult cutting into him and performing surgery as it happens for quite some time before he's cut off abruptly.
  • A cutscene in the first Ratchet and Clank shows robot reporter Darla Gratch reporting on slime aliens attacking a major city. The report ends just as one of the monsters sneaks up on her and attacks her. She's later seen again with a large chunk of her robot hair bitten off.
  • Used in a very depressing and slow way in Resistance 2 where radio man Henry Stillman broadcasts from a barricaded radio station in ruined Philadelphia. He starts as a professional and stable news man in the first radio broadcast you hear, but as you hear more in the various levels he slowly breaks down and then it ends with him declaring that humanity has lost the war and he decides to go "take a walk" in the alien filled streets. You can hear them all on youtube, but it's pretty depressing.
  • Likewise for the Hunk chapter in Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles where several of the overheard radio broadcasts are various newscasters and reporters frantically reporting on the zombie outbreak, ranging from a station that's been surrounded but which is stoically trying to warn any other survivors to escape, to a DJ who's lost it and keeps screaming about how they're all doomed.
  • A promo for the cancelled Dead Rush had a reporter reporting on the current monster outbreak when her crew is attacked. The last scene you see is the reporter getting lifted off her feet as growling is heard. Check it out.
  • Implied to happen at least twice in Command & Conquer 3: first to a pair of civilian reporters shortly after the Philadelphia is destroyed, and then again to a Nod reporter before Temple Prime is hit with the Ion Cannon.
    • It isn't really implied but outright shown. In the cases of both sides' reporters, they are pretty much in the middle of things. The GDI reporters are shown to survive, albeit shaken and disheveled. The Nod reporter, however, was at the epicenter of an explosion that blew up Eastern Europe.
    • Earlier, in Tiberian Sun, Oxana Kristos, who had been declared dead by her former colleague in the news studio (working for the traitor Hassan), casually sits down next to him on live TV. He's startled, but she tells him to "Please, continue"...then shoots him moments later.
  • The original King of the Monsters has a news anchor serving as the start-of-fight announcer. In the ending, he's shown in the studio... which promptly collapses on him as the victorious monster roars.
  • Happens in the intro to Shattered Union with a flash behind the reporter in Washington, D.C., followed by static showing that the capital has been hit with a nuke. Cue the Divided States of America.
  • Happens in Crackdown 2 in which a reporter on the Freaks disaster gets killed by one jumping on the top.
  • In Tropico 3, you can order your military to shoot the omnipresent DJ, Juanito, either to terrify rebels or simply For the Evulz.
  • Dead Rising 2 has this in the true ending. After the group realizes that Phenotrans is behind the zombie outbreak, Rebecca Chang tries to call her station about the story, and is immediately shot and killed by Raymond, who works for the company. It's also a Surprisingly-Sudden Death
  • In StarCraft II, during the Hyperon Bridge mission, a woman reporter is shown - among many other examples - describing a bad enemy attack. She's standing in a combat area, saying to the camera, "Zerg have just attacked a research facility..." which you can see in the background of where she's standing, before a large explosion turns the broadcast to static.
  • Shockwave Assault: A news reporter delivers a story on several meteorites hitting Earth, and suddenly the news room violently shakes and screams are heard from off-camera. The news reporter then shouts, "Control room? What is going on? Al? What is...", and the video cuts to a test pattern.


Web Comics

  • This strip of Ansem Retort has Sora and Namine watching a news report about Larxene nuking Disneyland and killing survivors, when she suddenly shows up, to the surviving news team's dismay.


Web Original


Western Animation

  • In Family Guy, Asian Reporter Tricia Takinawa is reporting on a hurricane when a car is blown into her.
  • The South Park episode "Night of the Living Homeless" has homeless breach the news station and ask the reporter for change, while the reporter is reporting on the homeless invading South Park and causing general mayhem.
    • An earlier episode ("It Hits the Fan" I think) featured a reporter covering the outbreak of a disease that causes the victim to vomit up all of their organs. Before he even gets a sentence out, he...vomits up all his organs and dies.
  • In Transformers Animated a reporter is covering the Robot War that Soundwave was starting when his camera started attacking him. Then we see a News-Bot covering the news a few days later...
    • He's okay, you get to see him covering the garbage dispute in the episode "Garbage in, garbage out".
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: After giving Spongebob a drivers' license just to get him out of his class, Mrs. Puff has a nightmare vision of Spongebob going on a carefree driving rampage. Cut to realistic fish-head anchor Perch Perkins reporting on the carnage, and immediately getting run over by the blissfully unaware sponge. He was conscious, though.

Perch Perkins: Let's...not use that take.

  • In Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Out to Launch" a reporter is making a live-action about a new Space Shuttle as it suddenly gets out of control and goes plummeting towards the control tower. It takes about two seconds after relaying the info for him to realize that he too is in said tower.
  • In an episode of Invader Zim, a giant rampaging hamster crushed the news studio where they reported it, which they had actually been able to easily see him about to do, as they were recording his every action.
  • Another variant, in which the reporter has already been hit: In "The Big Snit", a short cartoon produced by the National Film Board of Canada, a breaking news report on a nuclear holocaust is delivered by a skeleton.
  • Used several times on The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, ranging from Kent Brockman being attacked by zombies to Kent Brockman being beaten to death by land-walking dolphins.
    • Particularly memorable when he was killed by a giant advertising-icon-turned-moving-rampaging-monster version of himself.
    • In the fourth-season episode "Mr. Plow," Brockman makes out far better, but woe is Arnie Pie, Channel 5's "Eye in the Sky" traffic reporter. Pie has been assigned to do a report on skiing conditions from the news helicopter during a blizzard, but the weather conditions make it clearly unsafe to fly. When Pie complains about his safety, an annoyed Brockman grits his teeth and demands to know the ski conditions. Cut to Pie screaming for his life (as the helicopter crashes), "Tell my wife I love ..." before the video feed is lost. Brockman chuckles, "Heh heh heh, good one, Arnie!"
  • The reporter in Resident Evil: Degeneration was killed by a zombie while reporting the incident after seeing her cameraman look behind her, panic and run. In a stunning display of rank stupidity, she angrily asks why he stopped taping instead of, say, hauling ass along with him.
  • Used somewhat badly on an episode of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show in which two of Bowser's kids go to Earth and steal a sports car. While they're racing around causing chaos, a news team reports on the mayhem. The report ends when the kids crash into the camera shooting it. The camera can be seen in the report it's supposed to be filming.
  • In Futurama Season 6 Episode 4 Proposition Infinity: at the beginning of the episode

Linda: We now go live to our eye-in-the-sky hovercopter on the scene of that terrible hovercopter crash. Jim?
Jim: (in a burning hovercopter) The news is not good. I've just learned that my final words were: Back to you, Linda.
(Hovercopter explodes).

  • On Danny Phantom its a Running Gag for Lance Thunder, weatherman, to get sent out to cover whatever ghostly invasion is occurring. Forecast says that we have a 100% chance of seeing him get attacked over the course of the 'Ghost Watch'.
  • In Batman the Animated Series, the Joker releases a powerful cloud of gas that causes people to break into hysterical laughter. Inevitably, the radio report can't make it to the end without bursting into giggles.
    • The newspeople learn their lesson, though, and we see on a later TV broadcast that a reporter is wearing a World War I-era gas mask.
    • In the episode "Beware the Creeper", of The New Batman Adventures, Joker interrupts a special news program about him by gassing the crew. Then, he takes the news anchor, dumps him into a vat of chemicals (twice), blows him up, and lets the whole vat drain into the river. The anchor survived, but, needless to say, he wasn't exactly sane after that experience.
  • The Young Justice episode "Failsafe" features a Keystone City news reporter (Kid Flash's Aunt Iris of all people) becoming a victim of the alien invasion she's covering in the middle of her report. It comes with the nice touch of her coworker shouting at her to watch out before the camera cuts out.
  • In The Legend of Korra "And the Winner Is...", when Equalists attack the pro-bending finals, the radio commentator covers the attack as it happens, even when one of the Equalists enters his booth to silence him.

Shiro Shinobi: One of them is in the booth with me right now, folks! He is leveling one of those glove devices at me now, and I believe he is about to electrocute me! I am currently wetting my pants!

Other

  • Not exactly a disaster, but related: there was an Internet joke document years ago which parodied a day-by-day report on the Barcelona Olympics. In it, the Opening Ceremonies wrapped up with footage of perennial Olympics announcer Bob Costas using a fire extinguisher on his butt, because the guy who was supposed to light the torch instead fired his flaming arrow into the NBC press booth.
  • At the end of this The Onion video.
  • Mighty Python and the Final Rip Off had a report from the "man being eaten by a crocodile event" in which the reporter stood too close to the crocodile pit and got eaten.
  • The old King Kong attraction at Universal Studios has a reporter in a helicopter get caught by Kong and thrown, the helicopter crashing right above the tour bus.


Real Life

WPIX 11's satellite feed froze with this image when the station went off-air on 9/11
  • In a news report on 9/11, a reporter standing a few blocks from World Trade Center 7 was reporting that the fire department had cleared out of the building, fearing that its collapse was imminent... during this report, the building indeed collapsed, and the reporter found himself running from a cloud of smoke and debris. WE BETTER GET OUT OF THE WAY! According to his WABC TV bio, "On September 11, 2001, after the two jets struck the World Trade Center, N.J. Burkett and his photographer narrowly escaped the subsequent collapse of the South Tower."
    • As the main transmitters are on the WTC, the broadcast engineers were less fortunate: Don DiFranco (WABC 7), William Steckman (WNBC 4), Steven Jacobson (WPIX 11), Gerard "Rod" Coppola (WNET 13), Robert Pattison and Isaias Rivera (WCBS 2) did not survive. (WCBS did quickly get back on-air from a backup site on the Empire State Building.)
  • Anderson Cooper, reporting on Hurricane Dennis, was almost decapitated when a piece of aluminum siding suddenly broke off in the wind and flew straight at him. He managed to get out of the way.
  • A weather reporter is reporting on a torrential rainstorm with lightning and thunder, the whole bit, when suddenly there's a flash and the camera dissolves to static for two seconds before cutting back to the confused anchors. The weatherlady was struck by lightning. Worst of all, this is played for laughs on a comedy show about the funniest moments in television (she survived, but retired).
    • Irish channel TG4 looks to have staged an incident in which weather lady Caitlin Nic Aoidh appeared to have been struck by lightning during a 31 October 2016 report and had disappeared as the feed cut to a test screen.
    • That doesn't mean that this doesn't happen in real life; Dalian City, China weather anchorman Liu Xiaodong and his cameraman survived a hit on-camera which was picked up by the metal umbrella he was holding.
    • Hell, every time Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel is outside, it's a Real Life example...
  • One Braves game radio broadcast had a sequence something like this: "He hits a foul ball, and it's heading into the -" CRASH! "It's between your feet, Skip."
  • A slight variation, in which a reporter is reporting at an airport. Unfortunately, he's standing too close to the runway, and gets clipped right in the head by a plane as it lands.
    • Is this what you're referring to? Reporters standing too close to the action and getting hurt is fairly common, or, at least, they're fairly easy to find. Case in point.
  • This video shows a Georgian (south of Russia, not Southern US) reporter getting shot by a sniper while in the middle of reporting on the South Ossetia conflict.
  • Al Roker partially combined this trope with Crowning Moment of Awesome during the 2005 hurricane season. During Hurricane Katrina, Al reported from New Orleans and was clearly being affected by the heavy winds. At one point, he remarked that one of the other guys with him said, "Al, don't you wish you had your weight back?" (he had just recently had gastric bypass surgery). Al further said, "Right now, I think I do!!!" before the strong winds caused him to trip and fall.
  • On August 11, 1999, every news studio and reporter in Salt Lake City had front row seats to a tornado sweeping through the downtown core.
  • On July 15, 1974, chronically depressed Sarasota, Florida anchorwoman Christine Chubbuck shot herself in the head during a live News Broadcast.

"In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first -- attempted suicide."

  • Al Jazeera lost several reporters during the Second Intifada, some of which were recording at the time. Since reporters are required to give their locations to the IDF, the already-Israeli-critical network took it deeply personally when some of those deaths were caused by IDF strikes.
  • On July 27, 2007, Reuters reporters interviewing Iraqi citizens (some of whom were armed) were mistaken for militants by a US Army helicopter crew and fired upon. The story really became infamous when WikiLeaks posted the gun camera footage of the incident, given to them by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning.
  • In late 2011 a group of reporters found their hotel in the Middle East taken over by terrorists. This didn't stop them from continuing to transmit reports back to America with news of what was going on in the hotel.
  • During the bombardment of Homs, Syria by government troops, reporter Marie Colvin sent back reports of being shot at and shelled in the basement refuge she shared with both terrified Syrian civilians and her fellow journalists. The day after her last report, she was killed.
  • During the 2011 conflict in Lybia, Geraldo Rivera found himself under fire while broadcasting, leading to suitably dramatic footage of him seemingly leaning over and protecting his cameraman. He would later openly and proudly admit that the only reason he didn't run for his life was that he had bad knees.
    • Also, Mohammed Nabbous. Killed by a pro-Gaddafi sniper while on camera reporting from the Battle of Benghazi.
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