Lurid Tales of Doom

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Extra! Extra! Read All About It!! Mother Teresa's face found in cinnamon bun! Extra Extra! Man's pet cat Flopsy abducted by aliens! Extra!"

Sometimes newspapers of a more questionable level of veracity publish news that is clearly bunk, in the case of alien abductions and yetis being found. Other times they'll print that which might be true but seems to be kinda loopy and of questionable newsworthiness - toast burned in the likeness of historical figures for example. These stories are of course either complete fabrications in the former case (either made up by journalists or via bored Alan Fridge-esque submissions), or are just questionable coincidences.

The news industry calls this type of "news" 'Man Bites Dog', a name that seems rather more mundane than some of these stories actually tend to be. This sort of publication shows up in fiction from time to time too, especially ones which heavily feature either journalists or well known people (within their universe) frequently or where weird happenings really do occur and these stories are true - or sometimes these stories are bizarre even for the setting.

Not necessarily related to Doomy Dooms of Doom.

Examples of Lurid Tales of Doom include:

Comic Books

  • In Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, the main character reads one of these in his hotel room. The front cover reads: "What Elvis looks like now!", with a photograph of a sad old man attached.

Film

Literature

  • The Quibbler is a parody of this sort of newspaper, featuring stories about, among other things, Cornelius Fudge baking goblins into pies and Sirius Black being a wizard pop star in disguise. Also, the Muggle newspaper accounts of the flying Ford Anglia would have been written off as this by most.
  • The competing paper in the Discworld novel The Truth, The Ankh-Morpork Inquirer, publishes these sort of articles, most notably "Woman Gives Birth To Cobra."
    • The Ankh Morpork Times, on the other hand, eventually manages to print an article with the headline, "Dog Bites Man".
  • Andrew Looney's novel The Empty City features an elderly couple who are avid watchers of television and readers of the Weekly World News; when one of the latter's stories is that the Russians have developed a weapon that cranks up radiation levels from television to kill its watchers, they have to decide whether to abandon television or the Weekly World News.
  • The Midwestern Arcane in The Dresden Files. However, it turns out that much of the stuff they report is actually true.
  • The "National World Weekly" in Good Omens where Scarlet works briefly as a war reporter.
  • This is news writer Pascual favorite type of news in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and, unless reigned on, he will fill the news slot time with these. Sadly for him, he works in a "classy" radio station, so he ends scolded very often for this. Usually his coworkers reign on him, but then his coworkers also tend to leave him alone just as often.
  • In the 1980s set Monster Hunter Memoirs series the New Oreleans branch of the Monster Control Bureau, rather than try the agency's normal methods in a city where the supernatural is accepted fact, find the best way to hide the existence of monsters to those outside New Orleans is to "tell the truth badly". To do this they prints a local newspaper called The New Orleans Truthteller that is deliberately of exceedingly low print quality, filled with spelling/grammar errors and mainly this kind of "news" in addition to its real news about the city's monster problems. This way they can easily discredit anyone who tries to spread information about the supernatural outside the city by showing their claims come from this shoddy rag. Before the internet and digital photography become widespread enough to worry about, the larval Eldritch Abomination that made the city such a Weirdness Magnet has been destroyed.

Live-Action TV

  • Subverting this was the entire point of the TV series The Chronicle. Man goes to work at a tabloid, only to discover that all of their stories are true.
  • The Weekly World News has been mentioned in a few episodes of Supernatural including being used as inspiration by a magical trickster.

Music

Radio

  • There's a round on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue called Historical Headlines, about how a newspaper headline might look after a certain historical event. It usually draws on the perspectives of different English newspapers for comedy, and there's usually at least one joke about The Sport (see Real Life section). Such as a headline after the completion of Stonehenge: "The Sport -- "Giant set of alien false teeth ate my virgin"."

Tabletop Games

  • Enjoy the Forgotten Realms tabloid. Titles like "Bane vs. Cyric -- Winner Take All!!!!" and "Dire Pandas From Kara-Tur Invade the Unapproachable East!" — and much worse.
    • In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, the front covers of Dungeon magazine advertised its pre-written adventures this way. "Mad Ranger Goes Wild for Funky Fungus!" "Reclusive Giants Raise Evil Chickens!" "I'm Carrying Tharizdun's Love Child!"
  • The back cover of GURPS Illuminati is in the style of one of these, and the text makes frequent reference to the idea that 'everything you read in the tabloids is true'.
  • Atlas Games' Pandemonium takes place in Tabloid World, where all of the strange stories in this type of tabloid are true. PCs work as reporters for one of these papers, the Weekly Weird News.
  • TSR's Amazing Engine setting Tabloid!
  • Lurid Tales of Doom! for West End Games' Ghostbusters is the Trope Namer.

Video Games

  • Alien Love Triangle Times in the Sam & Max game "Situation: Comedy".

Web Comics

  • In El Goonish Shive, it turns out that Moperville's local newspaper is sold as one of these in neighboring cities... which, considering the number of shape-shifting mutants, aliens, wizards, and Anime-style martial artists that pop up around there, makes a lot of sense.
  • Scandal Sheet! is set at one of these, with the twist that some of the stories in the paper are real. "The best place to hide a needle isn't a haystack but a big pile of other needles."

Western Animation

  • Daria Morgendorfer and her pal Jane seemingly subsisted on Sick Sad World, which was not only a newspaper but also a television program in the Daria-verse. It's hard to parody anything as bizarre as The Weekly World News and its ilk, but Daria tried.

Real Life

  • Weekly World News was a satirical newspaper that published this sort of story until it folded. Some people genuinely believed them (sometimes), even though they often recycled stories; one standby every Presidential election year was "Space Alien Endorses [candidate for President]!" (complete with a photo of the alien and the candidate) and there were new doomsday predictions roughly every two weeks, often contradictory.
  • The Daily Sport in the UK is made up of mostly pictures of topless ladies and this sort of "News", such as World War II bombers being found on the moon.
    • And when an astronomer protested that he couldn't see it: "WORLD WAR II BOMBER FOUND ON MOON VANISHES!"
  • While The Sun is not the most erudite of newspapers in Britain it tends not to focus much on this sort of journalism, however one stand-out incident came from a March 1986 issue with the headline "FREDDIE STAR ATE MY HAMSTER!". This "story" has followed Freddie Star around since.
  • The Daily Mail has never been shy about getting in on this act. Their best moment was an online report on "the sinister cult of emo" that combined this with The New Rock and Roll in a masterful display of pigshit ignorance. It came complete with fabricated "satanic religious beliefs" of emos ripped from song lyrics ("the 'black parade' is a place where all emos believe they will go when they die") and the assertion that wrist slitting was an initiation ritual into the cult.
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