Examples of the Worst News Judgment Ever in Western Animation.
- In the American Dad! episode "Star Trek", Steve tries to be a "bad boy" to become popular and the newspapers depict his Poke the Poodle moments (littering, talking to strangers, etc.) as horrible offenses. Lampshaded in a secondary headline saying it was a slow news week.
- The plot of the Atomic Puppet episode "Media Darlings" centers on Atomic Puppet's frustration that the news is ignoring their superhero feats (like hurling a giant robot into the sun) to report on...a new hair salon and its owner. It turns out in the end that the hair salon's owner was a supervillain blackmailing the news to give him good publicity.
- Big City Greens: In "Breaking News", the news crew covering Bill's watermelon say there's nothing else happening. At that moment, a car speeds by chased by police, the driver yelling "I just robbed a bank!" The crew ignore it completely.
- In the Brandy & Mr. Whiskers episode "The Tortoise and the Harebrain", Mr. Whiskers challenges the tortoise to race. It then cuts to a huge newspaper headline with an announcer proudly declaring ladies' pantsuits are 50% off, before the camera pans to the tiny corner of the paper with the episode's conflict. The announcer then much less enthusiastically says the tortoise and hare will race. The gag is then reused at the episode's end when the tortoise and Mr. Whiskers tie.
- Camp Lazlo: The attempts to jazz up the camp newsletter end up this territory:Local hamster builds giant toothbrush out of toothpicks...THIS IS THE SCOOP OF THE CENTURY??? ARE YOU ALL MAD???
- An episode of Chilly Beach had two spinning papers covering the local election, and a third announcing that "Small town can support three newspapers!"
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: Weather News Network is really bad about this in both films. The world's weather is being thrown into chaos, and Sam has just shown footage of a tornado made out of spaghetti on the channel. Yet when Sam interrupts their broadcast right before the climax, one can see that they were reporting in large letters: "SEALS GET WET". The sequel also shows the same channel reporting on Flint's blunder with the Surprise Box at Livecorp at the beginning of the film...something that is decidedly not related to weather at all.
- The Danger Mouse finale, "The Intergalactic 147," has the news reporter taking his bulletin of the strange white planet on a collision course for Earth and turning it into a contest to name the planet.
- Family Guy:
- Quahog 5 News is frequently guilty of this trope, overplaying pop culture or non-news "news" while giving no attention to legitimate news.
- In "Switch the Flip", after Peter asks Brandee the virtual assistant for news headlines, she spouts out "Breaking news from The Huffington Post: Prince bred purple dolphins." Stewie responds by saying "Wasn't there a senator shot this morning?"
- Futurama:
- Lampshade Hanging with "Paper boys get award on slow news day." The same episode featured, "Monster To City: GRRRRRR"
- In the episode "A Clockwork Origin", we see a copy of a USB Today newspaper citing its top story as "Trial of the Century. Carbon-based life form accused of Creationism." The less emphasized story? "Carbon-based life discovered."
- "Roswell That Ends Well" has the Planet Express crew sent back in time to 1947 Roswell. Leela grabs a newspaper:Leela: Take a look at this!
Bender: 'High School Gym Renovations On Schedule'? What a load! - Parodied in "Less Than Hero", where, after the New Justice Team foil their first robbery, a Spinning Paper comes up... with the headline "No Action on Rates By Fed." The story "Mysterious Vigilantes Foil Crime" did make the front page, but it's tucked into the corner.
- A news headline in Gravity Falls: "Cheese crust pizza declared 'delicious'." Somewhere underneath it in the margins: "War or something..."
- Hey Arnold!: Stoop kid afraid to leave stoop. Hey Arnold liked to occasionally play this straight, including the day we saw "Stoop kid to leave stoop". The legend dies.
- Littlest Pet Shop (2012): When Mrs. Twombley retired from Kung Fu Quilting in the sixties, it edged out a minor story about men landing on the moon.
- Looney Tunes:
- 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". A pity it didn't get more prominence, since it was uncannily prophetic…!
- In the Wartime Cartoon "Scrap Happy Daffy", the fact that Daffy Duck has a really huge pile of scrap metal is somehow enough to warrant a front page headline in "The American Press". Hoarding was Serious Business in World War II.
- In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Glaciator 2", someone decides that Alya removing all photographs of Ladybug kissing Cat Noir (at Marinette's request, due to the latter being annoyed at them being taken out of context to call the superheroes a couple) from the Ladyblog was worth opening a news report.
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Ponyville Confidential" the Cutie Mark Crusaders write stories about such gossip as the Mayor dying her mane or Princess Celestia acting like a normal pony. This is hardly the Cutie Mark Crusaders' fault, however, as any attempts at normal news are thrown out by Diamond Tiara, who insists that the paper exclusively prints stories that basically turn it into a gossip rag. What makes it even worse is that when the CMC try to quit the paper, she blackmails them into continuing. Luckily she gets her comeuppance at the end, getting fired from her editor position and relegated to nothing more than a dirty job of running the presses, while the colt that was previously doing that job gets promoted to staff photographer.
- In The Ren & Stimpy Show, Stimpy gives the ailing Ren a sponge bath, then Ren has a total relapse when it is the next day's front page story — complete with secondary headline "Hundreds Witness Soapy Scenario!"
- Robot Chicken:
- In the sketch "Archie's Final Destination," the headline for the story about Betty's death reads, "Veronica Lodge Gets Poor Girl's Blood On Dress!"
- In another sketch, a headline informed viewers that spinning papers have been declared the most annoying cliche.
- Played with in an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle has just found a ruby-studded model boat, and the narrator mentions it made the front page of the papers. This is followed with several rapid-fire scenes of people reading the headlines of the front pages of the various papers, which are either serious news or celebrity gossip. Rocky corrects the narrator, and says it's the first page of the classifieds, which incorrectly claims that Bullwinkle is trying to sell the boat (he said he wanted to sail the yacht at an interesting party, and the paper said he would sell the boat to an interested party). This dinky and incorrect ad placed in a small-town Minnesota paper still somehow manages to end up in the classified section of a paper read by a nobleman in Pakistan.
- Also played with in the Upsydaisium Arc, as a smalltown radio newscaster reacted to the floating Mount Flaton passing overhead: "Sarah Gummie has broke her leg. There is a mountain floating over our town. And here's an important flash, egg prices up to 24 cents a dozen."
- The Simpsons:
- The show does this all the time for newspapers, often pointed out by having the "top story" edge out an article along the lines of "China Invades US" or "End of The World Imminent". Examples of this are: Main Headline "Cavalry Kids Lead Charge In Cleanup" with secondary headline "President Shoots Wife", and Main Headline "Lottery Drawing Today" with secondary headline "President, Rock Star To Swap Wives".
- In the episode "You Kent Always Say What You Want", Kent Brockman begins his Smartline show with:Kent Brockman: Tonight on Smartline, our report from the Middle East will not be seen, so that we may bring you a man who bought an ice cream cone.
Homer Simpson: That's me.
Kent Brockman: Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that the ice cream parlor and this station are owned by the same company, But I Digress. - In "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy", Kent Brockman closes his show with a report about the doll Lisa helped design (mostly because his daughter asked him to. After all, she was right about the Berlin Wall). As the closing music starts playing, Kent suddenly blurts out "Oh, and the President was arrested for murder but more on that tomorrow night... or you can turn to another channel. [Looks off to the side] Oh. Do not turn to another channel."
- In "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Mayor Quimby admits in a speech that he used the city's treasury to fund the murder of his enemies, but closes with the "I'm a bad wittle boy" catchphrase popularized by the villain of the week. The following newspaper shows the headline "Quimby re-elected in landslide", while a secondary story in smaller type underneath reads "Two more bodies resurface in harbor". Of course, it also shows the residents of Springfield are complete idiots. Earlier in said episode, the newspaper gives banner coverage to "Gabbo" as part of the media build-up to the revelation of Gabbo as a ventriloquist's dummy and host of an afternoon children's program competing against Krusty's program — although this is actually justified in that early coverage is on page 23 and it only makes the front pages later, presumably due to public interest drummed up by the campaign.
- Other headlines the Springfield Shopper has seen fit to feature on the front page include "Man Marries Woman in Wedding Ceremony"; and "Old Man Yells at Cloud."
◊ - Justified in one episode in which the incredibly mundane headline is accompanied by a smaller one reading "Slow News Day Grips City."
- The strapline to a story about Sideshow Bob's prison pardon reads "#1 Local Issue".
- A picture of a thin smoke trail leading out of the Capitol building, and Kent Brockman saying, "... leaving the Vice-President in charge," preceded him talking about how a local house (the Simpson house) had a faulty foundation that made it slant.
- Played with in the "Treehouse of Horror IX" story "Hell Toupée:Kent: (grim) And those little kittens played with that ball of yarn, (despondent sigh) all through the night. (perks up) On a lighter note, a Kwik-E-Mart clerk was brutally murdered last night.
- In one episode, Kent states "... which if true, means death for us all. And now, 'Kent's People!''"
- "I'm Kent Brockman, on the eleven o'clock news tonight... a certain type of soft drink has been found to be lethal. We won't tell you which one until after sports and the weather with 'Funny' Sonny Storm!"
- Another quote like the above "A certain house-hold fabric could kill you! Find out after the break!"
- Later in the same episode that the page image comes from, the squirrel is assassinated. Brockman promises "to stay with the story all night if we have to." Note this was the same episode where the major news story had previously been "Boy trapped at bottom of well" (a spoof of the Jessica McClure incident a few years prior, one of the first stories to get 24-hour coverage on cable news).
- It's lampshaded on one occasion where Kent closes a live report from the field with "There are those who would say that this is not news."
- And in "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can", Brockman deems Lisa Simpson getting into the Spellympics to be of more paramount importance than the destruction of Paris (as apparently does Marge, who switches off the television as soon as he starts to tell Springfield about the latter).
- In "Homer's Odyssey", the Springfield Shopper repeatedly headlines Homer's safety advocating, culminating with, "Enough Already Homer Simpson!◊"
- An Itchy and Scratchy episode shows Scratchy be given his own heart as a Valentine. He suffers no ill effects until he reads a newspaper with the headline "YOU NEED A HEART TO LIVE."
- In "I Am Furious (Yellow)", one Angry Dad short involves the titular character reading a newspaper with a headline that says "You Suck, Angry Dad".Angry Dad: That's opinion, not news!
- In "The Boys of Bummer", Bart becomes a townwide pariah when he fumbles the ball and costs the Springfield Isotots the championship game, and the incident makes the front page with the headline "SHAME!". Homer then turns to the business section, which reads "BOY'S ERROR WEAKENS DOLLAR".
- Invoked in "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part One)"; after Springfield Elementary strikes oil, Superintendent Chalmers visits Skinner to celebrate, and Skinner poorly tries to cover an unflattering write-up.Skinner: Superintendent, we made the front page today!
[He turns around a copy of the Springfield Shopper, with his hand over the "AWFUL" in "AWFUL SCHOOL IS AWFUL RICH"]
Chalmers: [Murmurs uncertainly] Now, what's that say under your hand, there?
Skinner: Hm? Oh! It's an unrelated article.
Chalmers: It's an unrelated article.
[Skinner nods]
Chalmers: Within the banner headline.
Skinner: Yes! [He puts the paper away] - In "The Winter of Our Monetized Content", Kent Brockman gives a full, detailed report on a student strike led by Lisa Simpson, then disinterestingly blurts out "In other news, the Pope has died."
- Lampshaded to death on South Park. If a newsperson shows up in an episode, they're guaranteed to end every scene they're in with something like "In other news, we enter our sixth straight day of absolutely nothing else to report about." In one episode, Stan's dad forces them to watch a Presidential nominee debate between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Just then there is "Breaking News" to show that Britney Spears has pissed on a ladybug while on a camping trip. We then "return to the stupid Presidential debate." Explored and given an In-Universe justification in "Britney's New Look", where the public wants celebrities to be Driven to Suicide for reasons similar to The Lottery.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob was assigned by Mr. Krabs to be the reporter of his new newspaper. While looking for a story, SpongeBob ignores a bank robbery, two guys wrecking a car, and a monster, and instead he writes about Patrick staring at a pole.
- In the Uncle Grandpa episode "Escalator", a news station apparently spends the entire episode reporting on what they call "the worst situation in the history of the Universe": Uncle Grandpa and Pizza Steve getting trapped on a broken escalator. Not an elevator. An escalator. On the reel, you can see a number of news items consisting mostly of gibberish phrases like "Acorn Futures Skyrocket", of which only the one that says "Christopher Columbus escapes Time Jail" makes sense in context.
- A 1934 Van Beuren Studios cartoon titled "A Little Bird Told Me" depicts birds operating a newspaper. They get a scoop and decide to print an extra edition. The news consists of a (live-action) human boy eating jam out of a jar with his hands.
