Deadline News

Not even the news is safe from the Blob Monster.

"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, they happen to fall victim to that very event they were 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.

It's very common in works related to the Zombie Apocalypse as a way to clue in the audience and the poor souls who have to suffer the event, that things are going downhill very quickly.

A subtrope of Apocalyptic Log and Ignored Vital News Reports. Sometimes appears in Kent Brockman News. Not related to Spinning Paper. See also The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You. See also Spectator Casualty, where a horrible fate happens to the audience instead of a reporter.

Not to be confused with Deadline Hollywood, an online magazine focusing on news from the entertainment industry.

As a Death Trope, there may be unmarked spoilers ahead. Beware.

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Examples:

• Real Life

Advertising

• A late 2000s AT&T commercial involves a reporter named Slate Sanchez, who is reporting from a demolition site; this commercial was part of their "alter ego" series. He isn't an AT&T user, so he and his crew have no service and are unable to receive a call that they are directly in a new demolition zone. Cue a warning klaxon, the TV going out and an explosion sound.
• Parodied in The Daily Show promos when Jon Stewart first took over hosting duties. One promo features him covering an evacuation in Saigon and he appears to be reading off of cue cards.
  Jon Stewart: The mass evacuation of Saigon has begun. Quite frankly, this reporter doesn't mind telling you he's scared to death and he's not sure he'll make it out here alive... Holy [beep]! Is that true?!

Anime & 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, Ryōga 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 Tendō 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.
• Dragon Ball 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 Dragon Ball Z Kai when Vegeta and Nappa come to Earth — the hapless reporters get taken out after Vegeta forbids Nappa from wiping out the Kai Fighters.
    Nappa: I HATE THE MEDIAAAAAAA!
  • In the original Saban dub, this was the scene with the infamous "Robot drone" and "I can see their parachutes" lines.
  • Babidi theatrically declares the beginning of his genocidal rampage through a global telepathic broadcast and keeps giving updates to the increasingly-terrified populace as he makes progress, only to have his last broadcast show everyone Goku's Super Saiyan 3 transformation followed by Buu and Goku's first fight, and then his own death at the hands of Buu.
• 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), 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.
• The first episode of Voltes V involves a news reporter being vaporized by a laser beam.
• In Darwin's Game, while the reporter was doing a broadcast of the damaged Moyai Statue, strange animals appear and kill her, alerting Darwin's Game GM to an invasion of the animals, resulting in him calling a Game Event on short notice with the goal of exterminating those animals.
• A one-off reporter in Death Note — right after the Second Kira has just killed a lot of reporters who disagreed with Kira — deliberately imperils his own life, John Hancock-style.
• A major event in a flashback in Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger, when news reporter Lydia the Giraffe , also known as the AI of the Eto Rangers' ship, Kirinda, is Big Bad Nyanma's first victim, five years before the start of the series.
• Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead: A reporter continues to do a live broadcast about the state of Tokyo as her zombified coworkers are trying to break into the studio. The broadcast ends with the zombies forcing their way in and one lunging at her.
• Arachnid: Towards the end of the Manga, a female reporter is doing a broadcast about a horde of sex zombies taking over the city when she is attacked by a group of them, ending the broadcast.

Card Games

• 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."

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.
• Batman:
  • The Man Who Laughs features 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 cameraman at gunpoint so he films him as he delivers his message. He then shoots the cameraman.
  • Also in Batman: The Cult the reporter in the studio gets shot at the back of his head while reporting on-air.
  • Neil Gaiman's Secret Origins issue featuring Batman villains has a Framing Device in which a sensationalistic news team try to track down members of Batman's Rogues Gallery for interviews. They make repeated unsuccessful attempts to contact the Joker, before the presenter delivers his final speech to the camera in the street, is brushed past by a shadowy figure, and predictably collapses and dies on air from Joker Venom.
• Ghost Rider
  • One of the '90s issues had this as a "most shocking ending ever" when Blackout kills a news anchor to spite Danny Ketch.
  • The new series did it with Sin ordering her men to spare the TV helicopter, so the whole world can see the destruction of Washington. Once she fights Ghost Rider and wins, she says the TV crew served their purpose and gives the order to blow up the helicopter.
• A variation in The Punisher's Welcome Back, Frank storyline: a reporter is giving an interview on the actions of another killer who has shown up at the same time as the Punisher's return, only for said killer to walk up, shoot the guy she was talking to in the head, then give his own interview before running away. The scene then cuts to two secondary characters watching in a bar taking bets on whether or not the reporter pukes on camera (she does).
• Judge Dredd: As the Day of Chaos nears its destructive climax, a news reporter who had been assigned to cover the upcoming election in Mega City One sends out one last broadcast to his dead and dying viewers before blowing his brains out on live television.
• Anderson: Psi-Division: In "Half-Life", the human Judge Death executes a flamboyantly gay talk show host on live television for mocking the Justice Department by making a pass at him. He turns to the audience to warn them about respecting the law.
• In Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, Trinity Wells, the Recurring Extra newscaster from the Davies era, gets possessed by white hole energy while delivering a report on people worldwide getting possessed by white hole energy.
• Oxymoron: Oxymoron forces SNN reporter Crystal Gaines to provide coverage for his crimes, promising to boost her career by giving her an exclusive heads-up on his rampage. He later murders her for this during a live interview, since this makes her a contradiction: a reporter who doesn't actually report news, but creates it.
• In Marvel 2099: Apocalypse, the news station NYFAX broadcast a live feed of SHIELD killing superheroes on the orders of the new President Evil. SHIELD then raid the station and kill everyone there.
• In The Pitt, two reporters fly towards the remains of Pittsburgh intending on reporting about it. Not wanting this to get out into the public, the Army helicopter is ordered to kill them, blowing up their helicopter.
• In JLA, the approach of the world-ending Mageddon is causing a Hate Plague to cover the Earth, inciting violence and war across the globe. A news anchor is seen, stating that the Justice League headquarters on the moon has just been nuked, and humanity's last hope is dead. Suddenly he pulls out a gun and shoots everyone in the newsroom, before putting the gun to his own head and tearfully signing off.
• During The Death of Superman storyline, Lois Lane finds herself in the middle of these. During the Last Stand, Doomsday chucks Superman into the Daily Planet helicopter holding Lois and Jimmy, but he's able to set them down safely. Partway through the Reign of the Supermen story, Superboy's grandstanding destroys a helicopter she's in, killing the pilot. She's able to bail and, thankfully, Steel's there to catch her.

Comic Strips

• One poem from a Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip featured a Tyrannosaurus rex rampaging through a city:
  A camera crew from channel nine
  Arrived in time to give
  A live report
  At this they failed
  because they didn't live.

Fan Works

• Pokémon: Nova and Antica: A variant. In Chapter 2, a Pidgeot tries to attack a news anchorwoman on-screen, but the cameraman saves her, leaving the camera to its fate. We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties immediately follows.
• In Arrow, a spinoff of The Victors Project the parents of the District 4 girl who died during the 74th Hunger Games kick off the revolt in District 4 by, while being interviewed about the Quell, drawing knives and cutting down several members of the camera crew (along with the mayor, his wife, and the Capitol liaison), doing so specifically to strike few in the hearts of the Capitol viewers.

Films — Animation

• Johnny Express: When the title character is trampling the tiny planet, a broadcast is cut off to static and we see a family watching frozen in fear.
• The reporter in Resident Evil: Degeneration is 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.
• A rather complicated example in Osmosis Jones: After Thrax had malfunctioned Frank's brain causing his body temperature to skyrocket to dangerous levels, the NNN (Neural News Network) reporters, at their station, promise their viewers to stay on the air for as long as they can, delivered in a tense manner as we see NNN footage of various body parts collapsing and shutting down. It's not the intense heat that injures them though, but infighting stemming from them feeling agitated. They do survive once Frank is cured, but both of them now have patches, casts, and gauze on them.
• The Rugrats Movie has this happen to Rex Pester twice, though he survives both times.
  • First, Stu accidentally slams into his helicopter while riding Dectar, ripping out the throttle and sending him crashing into the forest.
    Rex: And I never won an Emmy!
  • He later reappears with an arm in a sling, pushing away another reporter already on the scene. He is promptly attacked by the monkeys who steal his toupee, with Betty cheering them on.
    Rex: No! Not my toupeé! No!
    Betty: (laughs) Go get him, you little simians!
    Charlotte: Hey, Rex! Time for your closeup!
    Chaz: [in mock sympathy] Oh dear, too bad.

Films — Live-Action

• Shows up several times in the BBC disaster-scenario docu-drama End Day.
• Parodied in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Frank Vitchard, a reporter, reports on Ron and Veronica's situation in the bear pen when a bear rips his other arm off (he had already lost one arm during the big newscaster brawl earlier in the film).
• In Army of Thieves, a reporter who's on site to cover the zombie outbreak of Las Vegas gets devoured by the zombies with the cameras running.
• In Batman (1989), some news anchors are discussing the Joker's act of chemical terrorism on Gotham with the death of two models, both of whom have the Joker grin on them. A paper is slipped to the male anchor informing them of three more chemical deaths, when suddenly a female anchor starts laughing uncontrollably, and then falls over dead with the victims' characteristic grin on her face, becoming one of the at least 19 victims of the chemical.
• 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 Diary of the Dead, one of the first scenes shows a news reporter and her cameraman being attacked as they film a zombie attack, although the cameraman escapes and posts the footage online.
• Dracula 2000: A cameraman is filming TV reporter Valerie Sharpe when suddenly her neck snaps taunt and blood appears on her neck. The cameraman lowers the camera to see Dracula has her in his grip; he then kills the cameraman and adds Valerie to his Vampire's Harem.
• Downplayed in Godmothered. Hugh, who is doing a news broadcast, is only mildly injured after Eleanor, who is sledding, knocks him over.
• 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 Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed, the news report on the monsters terrorizing the 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 Gremlins features an omnipresent 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 opens with a reporter in the middle of the Invasion of Klendathu getting bitten in half by a Warrior Bug. His camera man survives for a moment longer but gets killed by going too close to another Warrior Bug to film it.
• In RoboCop 2, reporters from numerous TV studios show up to report the announcement of Delta City, and the unveiling of the new RoboCop 2 model. Moments after being tempted by the Nuke drug, the original RoboCop shows up and a massive gun battle erupts that pits RoboCop 2 vs the original, the Detroit P.D., and O.C.P. security. Once RoboCop 2's rampage ends, among the dozens of dead and injured are police, security, bystanders, paramedics, and newscasters.
• In Countdown to Looking Glass, reporter Mick Boyle is on a ship next to the first nukes going off... which is summarily itself nuked.
• Godzilla:
  • In the original Gojira, a radio crew reporting the attack on Tokyo realize they have no way out - they climbed a tower to get a good vantage point and just don't have time to climb back down and escape by the time Godzilla turns towards them. Accepting it, they announce this fact to their listeners and continue reporting until Godzilla destroys the tower from which they're broadcasting.
  • In Godzilla (1998), there are around three or four unnamed or unimportant reporters who buzz around Godzilla during his rampage. On the other hand, this is averted with the minor role of the camera guy — Victor "Animal" Palotti — who works with the main female character... He runs through the giant lizard's legs in front of it to get a good shooting angle, and Godzilla seems to flatten him... Then we find out that Animal stood right in the empty spot between Godzilla's toes. He couldn't believe his luck himself, either.
  • Godzilla Minus One. As Godzilla tears through Ginza, a group of reporters stand on the roof of a roughly 40 meter tall building filming him and reporting live for the radio. The kaiju comes within a few meters but they only try to move after Godzilla sideswipes the building and the part they're standing on collapses, taking them with it.
• A variation occurs in The Howling (1981); Karen 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 allows herself to be shot dead. Problem was, most of the home audience dismissed it as a special effect.
• 2012: Happens to poorly disguised Arnold Schwarzenegger copy — 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.
• 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.
• Christine (2016) is a biopic of Christine Chubbuck, which of course ends with her on-air suicide. See Real Life below as well.
• There are a couple of these in the Title Sequence of Dawn of the Dead (2004):
  "The president has direct contact with the CDC and head of FEMA. No further quest— OH MY GOD!"
  • More substantially, a bonus feature on the DVD release is a series of faux newscasts showing the world collapsing as the zombie plague spreads. At the end, the anchor is pretty much the only one left alive, and it's pretty obvious his days (or minutes) are numbered.
• Brought up in Happy Hell Night, where a college student is practicing 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 titular Villain Protagonist has killed multiple girls after stripping them topless, the climactic battle leaves the killer's fate ambiguous (to the public); then at the end of the film, a female news anchor reporting on the story is suddenly stripped topless by an unseen force and screams as she rushes to cover herself with her arms...
• Quarantine (2008): 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.
• Parodied in The Kentucky Fried Movie when the on-air announcer says, "Moscow in flames, missiles headed towards New York, Film at 11."
• Special Bulletin:
  • In this Made-for-TV movie, 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 impromptu media center across the bay and we get to see what her cameraman 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 second 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 reporter and her cameraman actually survive unscathed ... except for the likely fatal dose of radiation they both got.
• The made-for-TV movie Without Warning (1994) 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.
• Hobo with a Shotgun: The Drake, Slick, and Ivan invade a news broadcast on Slick's incineration of a bus full of schoolchildren, kill the newscaster by stabbing him through the chest with an ice skate, brandish the charred corpse of a child at the camera, and order the townspeople to kill the homeless.
• The Director's Cut ending of Little Shop of Horrors has an onsite reporter filming as the alien plants Take Over the World. The last thing we see is a giant Audrey II advancing towards the camera before it cuts to static.
• Both the 1953 and 2005 film adaptations of The War of the Worlds have the line, "Once they begin to move, no more news comes out of that area."
• Runaway: During the first "runaway" incident where a house robot commits murder and holds an infant hostage, a local news crew keeps bugging Sgt. Ramsay for live coverage from inside the house. The cameraman actually follows Ramsay inside to document it despite Ramsay's warning signs to get out of there for his own safety, and the guy is shot and killed by the robot.
• In Nightcrawler, this is engineered by Lou
• In the Cold Open of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which is actually The End... Or Is It?, a local TV news reporter and her cameraman are murdered by a disfigured slasher.
• The Bio Pic film Balibo, about the fate of Roger East and the Balibo Five during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, depicts East desperately transmitting a news telegram about the fighting to Sydney just before he is captured and executed by soldiers.
• A blink-and-you-miss-it version in The Sum of All Fears. A television in the Baltimore hospital that is hit by the nuclear blast is screening a live report of the President's emergency evacuation from the stadium (where the bomb is). The screen goes white a fraction of a second before the blast wave hits.
• Rampage:
  • In the second film, Bill carries out a massacre at a news station and takes the survivors hostage, arguing that they're spreading glorified propaganda for the powers that be and demanding an interview with his primary hostage, famed anchor Chip Parker, whom he later kills as well.
  • At the end of the third film, the homeless person who was inspired by Bill interrupts a live broadcast at a news station to kill the hosts and their crew.
• Barely averted in The Public Eye (1992). Joe Pesci's character, playing a 1940's tabloid photographer, has been tipped off about a Mafia hit and is waiting, camera in hand. One of the hitmen sees him taking photographs and aims his gun at him, while Pesci raises his camera to photograph his own death...whereupon a stray bullet kills the hitman before he can fire.
• In Universal Soldier: The Return, the live TV News crew and their van that gets taken out by a Unisol's grenade launcher.
  Squid: Well, that's gotta hurt! *chuckles*
• Happens to a cameraman at the beginning of Zombieland. The zombie who kills him then uses the camera lens to check his reflection to see if he's got any of the cameraman's flesh stuck in his teeth.
• Death Train: The chief hijacker, Alex Tierney, has a news crew brought onboard the train to prove to the world that the nuclear bomb they're carrying is real. Of course, this is used by the heroes to get their agents on the train, and Tierney is shot through the head on live television.
• A scene in the movie Vanishing on 7th Street shows the girlfriend of Luke vanishing on air when the lights go out. It's thanks to this and a single radio message about light that Luke even manages to survive as long as he does.
• Volcano has this in one part, with a news reporter standing right up against the line of barriers that are barely containing the volcanic lava.
• In Cloverfield, one female reporter was seen on a television screen reporting near the monster. What happened to her was...not explicitly revealed.
• In Predator 2, a female reporter is covering live a shoot-out between the police and Colombian drug dealers. She barely avoids getting caught by the line of fire.
  Reporter: While Los Angeles swelters in agonizing heat, drug lords wage bloody warfare in the streets. Yet another open conflict—(bullets ricochet near her) Oh, fuck this, get me out of here!
• Jimmy Stewart's character in Rear Window ended up confined to his apartment with a broken leg after being injured while on the job as a reporter.
• In Three Kings, some Iraqi soldiers forced a female journalist to leave, at gunpoint.
• Thrill Seekers: Tom was doing live coverage of a fire at a power plant when a collapsing beam crushes both his colleagues. He later finds out that he was originally supposed to die there as well. It is only because a time traveling tourist from the future distracted him at the right moment that he survived in the first place.
• Zombi 2 ends with the zombies invading New York City. A radio newscaster reports on their actions... then announces that they're breaking through his door. The last sound in the film is his scream as they attack.
• Midway (2019). A propaganda broadcast by Tokyo Rose is interrupted by shouting in Japanese and air raid sirens as the Doolittle Raid takes place.
• The protagonists of Chariot have woken up on an airliner circling above the United States. They find a mobile phone with a Houston news site as its homepage. As a newscaster speaks live, a mushroom cloud erupts in the background and the image freezes on her screaming face as the blast wave hits her.
• In V/H/S/94, the "Storm Drain" segment ends with the reveal that news reporter Holly has been inducted into the Raatma cult after we last saw her. She ends up puking Bad Black Barf on her co-anchor, graphically and gorily melting his face to the bone during a live broadcast.
• Gale Weathers in Scream (1996) is a tabloid journalist who shows up to the murders having written a True Crime book on a similar murder case the prior year involving the Final Girl Sidney Prescott, suspecting that these murders may be related. Naturally, she gets drawn into the killing spree, complete with her cameraman Kenny getting his throat slit by the killer, though she ultimately gets the Big Damn Heroes moment instead of dying. She becomes a recurring character in the sequels, though by the third film her role in the story has become very different.
• Gail Hailstorm in Scary Movie is a parody of the aforementioned Gale Weathers, complete with her doing a riff on Heather's breakdown in The Blair Witch Project after Ghostface comes for her. The ending, however, reveals that she was working with the villains all along. It's also inverted in one scene early on where a kid is making goofy faces behind her during her report, which annoys her so much that she shoots him on live TV.

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. Ultimately, every single death attributable to the storm is of a newsy.
• 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.
• Stephen King:
  • In Carrie, Carrie White's rampage takes out the offices of her town's newspaper, killing the Associated Press wire bulletin reporting on the mayhem and cutting the town off from the rest of the world in the process.
    There were no more AP reports from Chamberlain. At 12:06 AM, a Jackson Avenue gas main was opened. At 12:17, an ambulance attendant from Motton tossed out a cigarette butt as the rescue vehicle sped towards Summer Street. The explosion destroyed nearly half a block at a stroke, including the offices of the Chamberlain Clarion. By 12:18 AM, Chamberlain was cut off from the country that slept in reason beyond.
  • In 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. At another point in the book, a local TV news team overtakes its government handlers and, with guns in hand, begins reporting the truth about the superflu epidemic rather than the "approved" version. The military stops them by bombing the station and killing everyone.
  • Nightmares & Dreamscapes: In Home Delivery, which takes place during a Zombie Apocalypse, one of the last news broadcasts before the TV broadcasts shut down is of a reporter having a Laughing Mad fit after finding out the zombies breached the White House, devouring or infecting both the President and a few other politicians meeting inside.
• World War Z:
  • Reality TV variant: 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.
• In Gust Front, a reporter doing a feature on the human forces battling the Posleen on another world is witness to and victim of an unexpected attack that's deliberately shown on the air when the President of the US does a press conference announcing Humanity's First Contact and the pending Alien Invasion. The last scene shown, recorded by the camera that was dropped when the operator was killed, was one of the French Foreign Legion bodyguards shouting "Cameron!" as he jumps into combat with just his knife, presumably killed off-screen.
• The Clone: A Blob Monster is attacking Chicago, and people are evacuating. Reporter Peter Vashli is at Illinois Central Station when the titular "clone" oozes into the building. Vashli not only keeps reporting on what's happening right up until he starts getting absorbed by the creature... but while it's absorbing him, describing the sensations. He keeps talking until his cameraman also gets attacked and drops the camera, cutting the live feed.
• In the book Swim To Me by Betsy Carter, Delores (the weathergirl who dresses up as a mermaid to do her reports. She's a professional mermaid/swimmer in shows when not on TV) is sent out specifically to be this girl during a hurricane watch. The drama is upped when she spots a drowning child and drops her mike to rescue him.
• In The War of the Worlds (1898), a journalist named Henderson appears early in the novel to investigate the fallen Martian cylinder. He dies by Death Ray not too much later. Henderson, possibly the earliest example of this trope in fiction, is also the Trope Codifier, so much so that his character was carried over in Orson Welles' 1938 radio show and the 1953 version, if not the 2005 version. The book also subverts the trope: the narrator himself is also a journalist, though he does come close to death on more than a few occasions.
• The people involved in creating 1632 have an in-joke of creating minor characters of a certain name (based on a real life friend and colleague) who gets incredibly gruesome and often ridiculous deaths shortly after being introduced. In one of the 1632 books, he's an Intrepid Reporter in an era that really doesn't like people snooping into the secrets of high society and powerful conspiracies. Guess what happens...?
• In The Living Dead, the WWN crew and Chuck Corso broadcast news and information about the growing Zombie Apocalypse for the first two weeks after the outbreak begins. It ends when a group of assholes invade the studio and lets the hordes in, leading to most of their deaths and the producer shooting himself on camera.

Live-Action TV

• In 1000 Ways to Die, a very obnoxious Attention Whore of a reporter ends up Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by an uprooted mailbox while reporting on a hurricane. The Punny Name of the segment was "This Just In... My Chest".
• 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 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.
• In an episode of Babylon 5 the recurring "ISN" news station is stormed by government forces during a live broadcast as one of the signs of President Clark's tyranny becoming blatant enough for Babylon 5 to declare independence.
• In the original Battlestar Galactica, Serina is reporting on the peace celebrations when the Cylons attack.
• 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.
• Played with in Blake's 7. The episode "Warlord" opens with La Résistance secretly videotaping Federation troops massacring civilians. As the corpses are being dragged off, a trooper sees the camera operator, runs up and smashes his rifle into the lens.
• CSI had a Lights Out Somebody Dies version. The killer deflected suspicion by pre-recording what was supposed to be a live on-scene report so she could sneak back to the station, cut the power, and kill one of the desk anchors.
• 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. It predates TV, but could have been captured on a newsreel: On Mother's Day 1939, Bob Feller's mother was hit by a foul ball... from a pitch thrown by Feller.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • Season 1 episode 6: On Wilson Fisk's orders, Detective Blake and two uniformed cops are shot on live TV, as Blake has proven a liability to Fisk.
  • Season 3 episode 6: On Wilson Fisk's orders, Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter, dressed in a Daredevil costume tailored by Melvin Potter, attacks the New York Bulletin to get rid of Jasper Evans, a lifer who Fisk paid to shank him as part of a plan to get out of prison, and whom Matt and Karen have managed to track down and who is about to go on record with Mitchell Ellison. Dex kills several reporters with his batons before Matt shows up to engage him. A fight of cat-and-mouse breaks out as Dex and Matt chase each other around the newsroom, ending when Dex incapacitates Matt by stabbing him in the collarbone with a pair of scissors and dropping a bookcase on him. He then breaks into the room where Karen, Foggy, Ellison, and Jasper are hiding. In quick succession, he overpowers Foggy, disarms Karen of her gun, wounds Ellison with a pencil, and shoots Jasper in the face with Karen's gun. Dex then flees the scene, attacking Ray Nadeem and his FBI colleagues who have come searching for Matt. The next episode opens with a scene lifted right out of "Born Again" wherein Fisk is seen in a dark room with a row of TV screens all tuned to local news stations reporting on the attack. Ultimately, three reporters are confirmed killed, as well as several security guards, and at least two reporters are on life support. Karen is subsequently fired as she refuses to give up Matt's identity to a livid Ellison when she checks in on him at the hospital.
• 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 for 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!
• Dead Like Me features the death of a newscaster when a captive bear gets loose. Subverted—his wetting himself in fear while standing by a power socket kills him before the bear gets close enough.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Ambassadors of Death" has an inversion of the usual moral roles in this trope, with the heroes invading a press conference where the main villain is planning to murder an alien on live TV in order to start a war.
  • "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 shouting "Exterminate!" The screen goes dead... and clearly, so does the poor reporter.
  • In "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.
  • In "The End of Time", Part One, the newsreader and Barack Obama are turned into Master clones on live TV. Of course, so is the whole human race save Wilf and Donna, so there's nobody actually watching to be shocked.
    Newsreader Master: Breaking news: I'm everyone, AND EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS ME!
  • In "Revolution of the Daleks", after killing the Prime Minister on live television, a Dalek announces that all humans will be exterminated, then opens fire on the camera (and presumably the news crew) causing the TV screen to pixelate and Fade to White.
• A Running Gag in Drop the Dead Donkey was how Damian's sensationalist field reports always resulted in his cameraman getting injured. In fact during every Title Sequence Damien can be seen checking footage of a report from a war zone, during which the camera POV suddenly falls to the bottom of the trench, with on-screen Damien crouching without pause to continue his report.
• The Goodies
  • Done with a Giant Paw of Stomping in the 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.
  • In "Invasion of the Moon Creatures", science presenter James Burke and astronomer Patrick Moore are turned into rabbits during a BBC broadcast, right after assuring the public This Is No Time to Panic.
• A non-lethal version happened in The '80s cop show Hunter when Hunter and McCall chased a criminal into a news studio during a live broadcast. Captain Devane is at home watching all this on television. He just shakes his head at the sight of his two detectives looking embarrassed at the camera.
• In Lexx, a 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)
• 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.
• Tricia Tanaka gets hit by a meteorite on Lost while covering Hugo's chicken shack.
• The Man in the High Castle: After Adolf Hitler's death, an illegal news broadcast in the Greater Nazi Reich exposes the truth to the public before the newsman is shot to death on live television.
• Monty Python's The Final Rip Off has 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.
• In Mr. Show, Channel 6 "On the Spot News" has a habit of creating the stories they report as they're reporting them, from a reporter instigating a riot by throwing something at a police officer, to one reporter gunning down her colleague live on camera.
• New Tricks has one Victim of the Week as a radio shock-jock who burned to death live on air.
• Non-fatal example from The Sarah Jane Adventures episode "Secrets of the Stars": While describing people getting possessed throughout the world, the newsreader gets possessed. "I accept the Ancient Lights."
• Primeval: An episode features reporters who aren't smart enough to run away when a Giganotosaurus (think T. rex, only bigger) rampages through an airport.
• In Sleuth 101, one of the victims is a radio newsreader who was strangled with a microphone cable as she started the bulletin. Or rather, while she was rehearsing, as she was killed 25 minutes before she was supposed to go on, which was recorded by the killer to give himself an alibi.
• One That Mitchell and Webb Look 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 Deadline News stories, inevitably combined with a truly awful pun.
• True Blood: Russell Edgington crashes a live newscast, and kills the luckless anchor by ripping out his spine. Which he then proceeds to hold in his hands as he delivers a speech about vampire superiority.
  Russell Edgington: We will eat you. After we eat your children. And now time for the weather! Tiffany?
• The Whose Line Is It Anyway? skit "Newsflash" is a parody of this trope: it's based on putting Colin Mochrie in this role — only he doesn't know what he's reporting on. The skit uses greenscreen technology to run footage he can't see as his "on-the-scene" background. Watch here.
• 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!
• Invoked by Jim Cantore and The Weather Channel , talking about tornadoes. An EF 5 tornado hits the studio, to explain.

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.
• The music video for the Barenaked Ladies song "Odds Are" takes the form of a news bulletin as the anchors and field reporter cheerfully cover a series of catastrophic events including a meteor impact, an Alien Invasion, global warming, a volcano that erupts dinosaurs, a Zombie Apocalypse, and finally a nuclear war. By the time the bomb drops, the weatherman is a Zombie Infectee, the newsdesk is on fire, and the studio backdrop has collapsed.

New Media

• 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.

Puppet Shows

• A truly disturbing example comes in the Series Finale of the Jim Henson property Dinosaurs. The main plot of the episode sees the WESAYSO corporation destroying the mating grounds of a particular insect; the lack of the bugs leads to a chain of events that ultimately results in snow clouds forming that will lead to the mass extinction of all life on Earth, a Sudden Downer Ending and Green Aesop taken to the extreme. To hammer the point home, the penultimate scene shows the main characters gathered around a television set watching news anchor Howard Handupme deliver the final forecast: "And taking a look at the long-range forecast: continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold. This is Howard Handupme. Goodnight... goodbye." We then cut to the family's home being gradually covered with snow...
• 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.

Radio

• In The War of the Worlds (1938), Carl Phillips, reporting live from Grover's Mill, is burned to death mid-sentence by a Martian heat ray. Likewise, the reporter in New York narrates the advance of the Martian tripods until he is killed by their poison gas. The broadcast goes to dead air, then one voice comes on, repeatedly asking if anyone is out there. Independence Day paid homage to this as part of its advertising campaign.
• The Peoria Plague is a radio drama produced by WHUN (named WSWT in modern day) in Peoria, Illinois, in 1972. Recorded in the same defictionalized style as the 1938 War of the Worlds, it follows a fictional radio host reporting on strange outbursts of manic violence throughout Peoria, which eventually turns out to be a Zombie Apocalypse (implied to be the result of aliens) that quickly spirals out of control. The broadcast ends with the host and his technician being the only people left in the station, and the host realizing that the reason the plague spread so fast wasn't because the zombies were contagious, but as a result of Water Source Tampering... just as he'd taken a drink of water.

Theater

• The sports version is in the Australian play And The Big Men Fly, where the football games are always narrated as an Offscreen Moment of Awesome by the sports radio commentators. At the end of the play one of them gets hit in the head by a football, deliberately kicked up there in payback for an earlier incident.

Theme Parks

• At Universal Studios:
  • In the queue video of The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, a news reporter is shown getting footage of the Sinister Syndicate stealing the Statue of Liberty, before Doctor Octopus attacks and the broadcast abruptly ends.
  • During the queue video of the original version of The Incredible Hulk Coaster, a live news report that follows the military surrounding Bruce Banner's laboratory ends when the Hulk breaks out and hurls a tank at the camera, and presumably the reporter as well.
  • The former King Kong Encounter segment of the Studio Tour had a reporter in a helicopter get caught by Kong and thrown, the helicopter crashing right above the tour bus.

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 show 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.
• There's one memorable moment in Final Fantasy VII: a TV anchorman is commenting about the latest earthquakes that have specifically targeted Sector 7 when suddenly he looks up in horror as debris crushes him and the camera to death. This represents how both the slums AND the mega-city above were purged of civilians just to kill a ten-man group of terrorists.
• 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.
• Happens two times in Not for Broadcast, one during Day ???: The Lockdown, where Patrick Bannon is killed on air by the Snugglehugs toys. However, this is only happening inside Alex's mind so he's perfectly fine in the real world. The second one, this time actually happening and more serious, happens on Day 296: The Heatwave, in which Jeremy seizes a gun from a Community Cohesion Officer in the studio and holds the newsroom hostage. Depending on your choices, he either commits suicide, gets gunned down by security, or is arrested.
• Doable in the Rampage series.
• Mass Effect:
  • Everyone's favorite reporter (Kahlisah Al-Jalani) can end up getting punched out by the person she insists on pestering. Repeatedly.
  • 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 and she realized that she was starting to show signs of Indoctrination.
    "This is how a human dies. Ramming Speed."
• 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 & Clank (2002) 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.
• In Batman: Arkham City has The Joker in an attempt to delay Batman from getting the cure back from Harley Quinn, give an anonymous tip to Vicki Vale to lure inside Arkham City then have his thugs shoot down the news copter after she arrives. Batman saves her of course but the rest of the news crew aren't as lucky. She still manages to continue the broadcast even after getting shot down though.
  • Batman: Arkham Origins has Vicki end up in the inverse situation to the one above. Once again she's doing a report about Batman in a helicopter ^note  In a rather notable plot point, this is the first live footage that confirms Batman's existence in this continuity. and once again The Joker's thugs shoot at her. This time, however, the thugs don't have any rocket launchers so the chopper leaves as soon as the camera is shot out.
• Frontlines: Fuel of War has a reporter as one of the main characters. They don't die, but do have some close calls namely being kidnapped in the first and having to stop a broadcast when when the Russians resort to nukes.
• 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 newsman 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: The 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.
• Command & Conquer
  • Happen at least twice in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars: 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. 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 Command & Conquer: 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, because you don't like him, or simply For the Evulz.
  Juanito: This is TNT! And we are dynamite! And we are about to explo— [BOOM]
• 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 the original, the player character Frank West is a journalist who ultimately has to save the survivors he intended to report upon. In several of the endings, he dies in the attempt, and even in the best ending, he is still infected.
• 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.
  • Another example in the same news clip, though with no reporter and instead implied death of the cameraman. The camera shows the Queen of Blades walking down a street, she then snaps her head to the side and looks right at it. The camera goes to static immediately after.
• Steel Harbinger has an in-game cutscene where two news anchors (a man and a woman) are reporting live on the outbreak. A tentacle suddenly grabs and assimilates the woman, while the man, oblivious to what's happening, continues with his report as the camera focuses on him. Suddenly he realizes the woman beside him is now a half-human convert, and the screen goes dead.
• Shockwave Assault: A news reporter delivers a story on several meteorites hitting Earth, and suddenly the newsroom 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.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale) has an instance of this during Episode 1, if the player decides to help fix Carley's radio, which is tuned to the station she works for. Gunshots and breaking glass can be heard in the background as the reporter is told they have to go off the air, before the transmission cuts off.
• The epilogue of Virtue's Last Reward begins with a newscaster discussing the horrible extent to which the Radical-6 virus has spread before succumbing to it and killing herself.
• The first trailer for Fallout 4 begins with a dog exploring a decrepit house, before flashing back to how the place looked in the moments before the bombs fell. In the flashback, the radio is on, and the newsreader shakily breaks the news of confirmed nuclear detonations before dropping the franchise's iconic Tag Line:
  My God. Our soldiers were right. War... war never changes.
  • The game's prologue has a TV reporter breaking said news of nuclear detonations and loss of contact with other news stations, before the broadcast is interrupted.
• In the prologue of The Last of Us, a television news crew is reporting on the start of the Zombie Apocalypse when a group of soldiers urge them to leave due to a nearby gas leak. This proves to not be a Gas Leak Cover-Up when an explosion knocks out the broadcast, at which point the character watching the news sees a massive fireball several miles away.
• Anna Hutchens in Odium, very excited to find herself reporting from the middle of a monster-filled city. Just think of the ratings! Though it's probably a good thing that your team found her just as she was cornered by monsters. She joins your team for a while, but fights about as well as you'd expect from a reporter...

Web Animation

• 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 the world itself.
  "Oh, Crap!, that will be broadcast all over the world!"
• The Piemations short "Bird Town News" has birds reporting on a crisis of bird houses falling from their trees. The punchline has The news station itself falling from its tree right on camera behind the reporter as they finish the story, causing the signal to cut off.

Webcomics

• One 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.
• In Commander Kitty, one of the news anchors reporting on how 45% of the galaxy has just inexplicably turned blue ends up transforming mid-sentence.
• Dracula Everlasting: A reporter investigating the murders picks a wrong night to do a report in front of Dracula's house. She's later seen among Dracula's recent brides (the girl on the right in the fourth panel. The scarf she wore as a human being a giveaway).
• In El Goonish Shive, Super Elliot reports live at the scene of an impending meteor crash that he refuses to stop out of a misplaced sense of journalistic integrity. The strip ends just before he is engulfed in the blast and it's unclear if he survives.
• A non-fatal example in Housepets!. We're introduced to the reporter Kate Gelato at the beginning of Heckraiser, where she reports on rumors of people being turned into animals. Near the end of the arc, after being caught in the middle of a city-wide Forced Transformation, she reports on the incident while freshly transformed into a mustelid. Other than some size issues while conducting interviews, she seems largely unfazed by this.
• Happens in Paranormal Mystery Squad when the PMS is fighting K'aanll'ngua, though they manage to save the reporter.

Web Original

• In 1983: Doomsday, several news networks such as CNN or NBC were showing the 35th Emmy Awards when a special announcement from the white house interrupted the broadcast. In it, Press Secretary Larry Speakes comes out and announces that World War III has begun and that several nuclear missiles are inbound to targets around the world, and then collapses from a stress-induced heart attack. Cue the horrified reporters.
• Whateley Universe: in "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" the team is in a simulation, pursuing supervillains across downtown Dallas. A news helicopter that swoops in to get pictures (against police directives) gets a surface-to-air missile from the supervillains for their efforts.
• The Onion:
  • At the end of this video.
  • And these two.
  • This has a series of reports on the existence of "concentric circles" emanating from a point on a square image, and the associated images that follow; a voice having to do with a picture of a cell phone reports on what's clearly disastrous local weather conditions, then crashes.
• Welcome to Night Vale:
  • A non-fatal example happens to Cecil in episode two, when he is possessed by the Glow Cloud.
  Cecil: "And now, slaves of the Cloud, the Weather..."
  • Cecil frequently reports on terrifying and potentially deadly events happening right in his radio studio rather often. He reports from his hiding place under his desk as Station Management emerges from their office for the first time in recent memory, gets possessed at least twice following the Glow Cloud incident, follows a portal into a bad Mirror Universe and continues describing what he finds there, and remains at his post during Strexcorp's takeover of the radio station.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged naturally includes the DBZ example - specifically, Cell. After the TV reporter attributes all the Empty Piles of Clothing to legalized marijuana, a familiar shadow falls over him.
  "Just a moment, someone is approaching! Excuse me, you terrifying-looking gentleman, what are your opinions on the legalization of - OH MY GOD, NAAAAA-"
  • Cell makes a habit out of this one; not long after he makes a request to a call-in radio show. The song he requests? Video Killed The Radio Star. He then signs off by thanking the hosts, and telling them he'll be right over - and the audience gets to listen to every second of what follows, even while the song keeps playing in the background.
  • Naturally there's his announcement of the Cell Games, once he's finally achieved his perfect form.
  Cell: (Holding the TV anchor by the throat) The following contains violence, course language, and adult situations not suitable for minors. Viewer discretion is advised. (Crushes the anchor's neck)
  • Nappa blowing up the "Paparazzi", as he calls them, in episode 7. The "cargo robot" bit from the original DBZ dub is parodied by having the announcer state that the cargo was people.
• Economy Watch: The Meet The Johnsons news headquarters gets attacked by zombies whilst Pepita is reporting the virus outbreak in "Night of The Economic Dead", the show's Halloween special.
• This Rum and Monkey news roundup:
  "Meanwhile, in other news, reports that the maniac behind the campaign of retribution is right behind me have been verified, and key witnesses have been found to be gesturing at me frantically. A spokesman for me has declined to comment, stating only "please don't kill me," before making a doomed attempt to barricade the door. Latest updates indicate that I'm going to die, oh shit here he is, he's in the fucking door and he's got a shotgun, and he's about to -"
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: In the Waluigi Arc, Jeeves goes out reporting on the T-Pose zombie apocalypse. He even tries interviewing one of the zombies, and prompty gets attacked and infected.
• CollegeHumor: In the "End of the World parody", several of Channel 9's reporters are killed on live television, including a newscaster being devoured by zombies invading the studio.
• In Winter of '83, a meteorologist for K83FC is murdered and replaced by one of the Snowlems invading.

Western Animation

• In Family Guy, Asian Reporter Tricia Takinawa is reporting on a hurricane when a car is blown into her. Cut to the studio, where the weather mime then blows into anchors Tom Tucker and Diane Simmons.
• In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Sprout", the episode's experiment, which resembles a giant Venus flytrap, starts running amuck. We hear a female reporter reporting on it on TV, and she screams as it's implied that one of its tentacles lifts her away. Jamba and Nani's nonplussed reaction suggests it wasn't fatal though.
• South Park:
  • The 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.
  • The episode "It Hits the Fan" 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... But he's okay, you get to see him covering the garbage dispute in the episode "Garbage in, garbage out".
• Huxley Prescott of Transformers: Rescue Bots once put himself in a life-threatening situation by accident when his parachute cord tangled during a live television event in "Rules and Regulations". The Rescue Bots managed to cushion his fall enough to keep him from dying.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: After giving SpongeBob a driver's license just to get him out of his class, Mrs. Puff has an Imagine Spot of SpongeBob going on a carefree driving rampage. Cut to Realistic Fish Head reporting on the carnage, and immediately getting run over by the blissfully unaware sponge. He was conscious, though.
  Realistic Fish Head: 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 sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, a breaking news report on a nuclear holocaust is delivered by a skeleton.
• The Simpsons:
  • Used several times on the 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 Season 27 episode "Orange Is the New Yellow," Arnie Pye, with the threat of losing his job if he failed to agree to the assignment, was involved in another helicopter crash, this time when it is sucked into a large tornado ... all while delivering a live news remote. Shortly before the live feed is lost, he tells Brockman off and screams that the worst thing of all is that Brockman's arrogant voice is the last voice he'd ever hear. However, as he had cameos in two Season 28 episodes, he presumably survived the crash.
• Used somewhat badly on an episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 in which Hip and Hop 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 it's 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'.
• 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. Though the last thing that even a stock market ticker reads is "Joker +100% HA HA HA".
  • 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 (2010) 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. Thankfully, the whole episode is taking place in the characters' heads.
• 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!
• One episode of Back at the Barnyard has Otis posing as a television reporter. When Mrs. Beady tasers him, he declares "This just in: I'm in horrible pain!" before passing out.
• In the Gravity Falls finale, reporter Shandra Jimenez reports on the devastation of the Weirdmageddon and gets turned to stone by one of Bill Cipher's eye-bats, finishing her report with "I'm Shandra Jimenez, and I'm turning into stone!" before freezing completely.
• The "Superbabs" segment of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Cinemaniacs!" has a news anchor reporting on a giant blob devouring Acme Acres. Unfortunately for the anchor, the blob starts devouring the news studio as well, and he screams in panic before the broadcast is lost.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In a few episodes, a news report on the chaos caused by the Monster of the Week is interrupted by said chaos. Case in point, when Robostus brings machines and inanimate objects to life:
    Nadja Chamack: Paris's only hope in this dire situation is Ladybug and Cat N - hey! (chased off by cameras and stage lights)
    Cat Noir: (watching) Oh, come on! She could've at least finished saying my name.
  • Intrepid teenage vlogger Alya Césaire has a few near misses with this trope as well, much to the frustration of Ladybug.
• Parodied in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius when they have Sheen fake an alien news broadcast. The reporter is just his hand with some googly eyes on, the monster attacking him is clearly just his other hand, and the attack suddenly stops so he can conclude the broadcast with "That is all." All but two of the aliens still fall for it.
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, when the world is being attacked by martian zombies, one of them starts eating the head of a reporter at the beginning of a broadcast, causing the camera crew to switch to another reporter that was right next to the first one.
• One episode of Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) involves a non-fatal attack. During a TV report on a group of lion men turning people into more of their kind, the reporter is turned into a lion himself during the broadcast.
• Godzilla: The Series: Secondary characters Audrey Timmonds and Victor "Animal" Palotti tend to be in the thick of the latest Godzilla vs Monster of the Week showdown when reporting.
• Tripping the Rift has a reporter covering the new phenomenon of "evil" that Chode has introduced. He is explaining the concept of "stealing" when someone demands the microphone, and shoots the reporter when he refuses to hand it over.
• Phineas and Ferb: Played for Laughs in "Night of the Living Pharmacists" as an entire news team is turned into pharmacists in quick succession with each cut between them, starting with field reporter Don Adaded and his camera crew, then the studio weather reporter, then the traffic reporters in a helicopter, and ending with anchor Gordon Gutsofanemu.

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