Dead Line News: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

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.

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]].

 

 

{{examples}}

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* ''[[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 ''[[Updated Rerelease|Dragonball Kai]]'' when Vegeta and Nappa come to Earth - the hapless reporters get taken out after Vegeta forbids Nappa from wiping out the <s> Z</s>Kai Fighters.

* 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]]''.

 

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* In the ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|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.

 

== [[Film]] ==

** In ''[[Dark Knight Trilogy|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 ''[[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 [[The Voice|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.

** Bonus points for his cameraman doing the exact same thing.

* Shows up several times in the BBC disaster-scenario docu-drama "Day/After".

* 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 [[Our Werewolves Are Different|werewolves]] in the forest back to civilization, and not only turns into a werewolf on live TV, but is eventually shot dead.

** That wasn't Schwarzengger, that was a poorly dubbed stand in of him.

* 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.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* This was a common occurrence on ''[[The Muppet Show]]'', where a news report would often end with the subject of the report [[Drop the Cow|falling on the Newsman]] in a [[Slapstick]] manner.

* Parodied on ''[[The Daily Show]]'' during [http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=127291&title=The-Bat-Incident 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.

** 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 an episode of ''[[Babylon 5]]'' the news station is stormed by government forces during a live broadcast.

* A variation occurs in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SPWgodul_E 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.

* 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.

** 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.

* 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.

* 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.

* Russell Edgington pulls off a juicy one in the third season of ''[[True Blood]]'' as he [[Killed Mid-Sentence|murders the anchor during a live newscast, then proceeds with his exposition while holding the poor victim's blood-soaked spine in his hand.]]

 

 

== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==

* One poem from a ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' Sunday strip featured a [[Tyrannosaurus Rex]] rampaging through a city:

because they didn't live. }}

 

 

== Trading Cards ==

 

 

== [[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.

* Everyone's favorite reporter (Kahlisah Al-Jalani) from [[Mass Effect]] can end up getting punched out by the person she insists on pestering.

* ''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 [[Fridge Logic|with a large chunk of her robot hair bitten off]].

* 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. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsUcjQp4Qb4 Check it out].

** 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 [[Unperson|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.

* 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|Crackdown 2]] in which a reporter on the Freaks disaster gets killed by one jumping on the top.

* ''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]] ==

 

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

* Played to extremes in ''[[The Demented Cartoon Movie]]'', when Zeeky H. Bomb is interviewed live on television. Not only is the interviewer consumed by the nuclear explosion caused by the Zeeky words, but so are viewers around the world, followed by [[Earthshattering Kaboom|the world itself]].

 

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** 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".

* 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.

** Particularly memorable when he was killed by a giant advertising-icon-turned-moving-rampaging-monster version of himself.

* The reporter in ''[[Resident Evil]]: Degeneration'' was killed by a [[Our Zombies Are Different|zombie]] while reporting the incident after seeing her cameraman look behind her, panic and run. In [[Too Dumb to Live|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.

(''Hovercopter explodes''). }}

** The newspeople learn their lesson, though, and [[Continuity Nod|we see on a later TV broadcast]] that a reporter is wearing a [[World War I]]-era gas mask.

 

== 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.

* 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]] ==

* 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).

** Hell, every time Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel is outside, it's a [[Real Life]] example...

** ABC's Al Michaels, during Game 3 of the 1989 World Series at San Francisco's Candlestick Park [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpAPILKw3iY just as the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area]: "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth-"

* 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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSOsskpf8r0&feature=related 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. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21A7-1SFRtQ Case in point].

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzJy1Ib-t8k 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.

* On August 11, 1999, every news studio and reporter in Salt Lake City had front row seats to a tornado [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2gTeXwdtPw sweeping] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8HgzXzZQgc through] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSorTVDSJqQ the downtown core.]

* 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.

[[Category:Just for Pun]]

[[Category:News Tropes]]