This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Morganite: Can anyone point to a specific example of this from CSI? I'm not sure I remember newspaper stories coming up... ever. `.`;
Gus: :-D My favorite: World Mortality Rate Remains Stable At 100%
Sikon: Took out .pdf because they do actually contain text and not graphics, and can be searched. In fact, Google can index them.
Nobodymuch: I remember being puzzled by a fairly recent Doctor Who where they arrive in depression-era Manhattan, only to find a newspaper announcing a spate of disappearances of people as headline news. True, it isn't just the plot hook it really is important. But since the people disappearing were all homeless people, I kind of doubt it would have made the lead story of a realistic paper.
((SKJAM)): A one-shot opponent of Superman's back in the 1970s was a victim of this trope. He was a brilliant scientist who'd made a number of landmark discoveries/inventions, but every time he did this, Superman would do something and the Daily Planet buried the scientist's story on the back pages. Bitter, he decided to get rid of the one person preventing him from making the front page.
In the end, though, he wound up buried in the back pages anyway...in the obituary column.
Novium: For the real life example about the ranking of news stories...while I'm sure there is some ridiculous bias there, I think what you have to consider is a)the bias towards more recent events and b)many of the things listed (the holocaust, 20 million dead in china, etc) are more historical. That is, a lot of it only became known way after the fact, and not all at once even then, and they were part of developing situations, which can only be encapsulated into "an important story" from a historical point of view. With that in mind, you could reasonably expect the bombing of pearl harbor to be higher up than WWII, or the fall of the berlin wall to be a bigger story than the collapse of the soviet union. Big news stories happen all at once.
BritBllt: Moving here, because I don't see how it fits the trope...
- The Ghostbusters are on front page of USA Today and the covers of Time and the Atlantic Monthly, but they still only have one secretary and Sigourney Weaver's friend fails to recognize Bill Murray's character.
They're on the covers of magazines because ghosts are turning out to be real, and the Ghostbusters are very publicly fighting and catching them. They still only have one secretary simply because they're not spending money on another one for some reason (it's implied that their technology's crazy expensive). Dana's musician friend doesn't recognize Venkman because he's a snooty elitist (though perhaps also because Peter's in civilian clothes rather than a jumpsuit). At any rate, the news media seemed to be doing its job.
Also, just as a comment...
- The 1943 Bugs Bunny cartoon Tortoise Wins by a Hare shows a newspaper with a banner headline "HARE RACES TORTOISE TODAY", while a much smaller headline on the same page reads "Adolph Hitler Commits Suicide".
I knew Bugs Bunny had lots of Parental Bonuses, but wow... I have got to start paying more attention to them!
