History WorstNewsJudgmentEver / RealLife

* The tabloid series ''Inside Edition'' seems to exist solely to report every move Bristol Palin makes. Yes, they have stretched a brief news story from 2008 across several years.

* When Creator/{{CNN}} had their Windows 2000 computers struck by the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotob Zotob computer worm]] the network inexplicably spent three hours covering it as a live breaking news story when it was just mainly confined to their computers and not really causing all that much havoc beyond late-night mocking and the Turner IT team having to fix every computer in the CNN Center.

* On October 28, 2022, a man broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband, a major story, especially coming so close to the midterm eleections. The front page of ''The New York Times'' had it as a ''below the fold'' short story with the top ones ranging from the economy to Elon Musk buying Twitter, the death of Jerry Lee Lewis and the page dominated by a photo of new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at home with his daughter and discussing his private wealth.

* April 4, 2023, was a historic day for America. [[UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump Donald Trump]] became the first former president to be arrested, having been charged with 43 felony counts. On the same day, the second trailer for ''Film/{{Barbie|2023}}'' was released. Guess which story got more coverage on social media?
* In June 2023 there were two maritime incidents. The first was the shipwreck of a boat full of migrants off the coast of Greece, with hundreds feared dead. Days later, an [=OceanGate=] submersible named Titan disappeared in the Atlantic with 5 people aboard. While both received media attention, the Titan's disappearance received far more coverage, in part because of it's passengers (including a British billionaire and the CEO of [=OceanGate=]), as well as the fact that the Titan was on an expedition to the resting place of the Titanic. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-migrants-boat-sinking-titanic-submersive-missing-rcna90336 Several organizations criticized this]] because they felt that more attention and resources were being given to a submersible carrying a few rich tourists than to a boat filled with hundreds of migrants fleeing their country.
** On the same as the ''Titan'' sinking, Israel launched what was then considered the largest military operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, including the first use of military aircraft in the West Bank in over twenty years, when they killed six Palestinians and injured over 90 more in an attack on the Jenin refugee camp. This ended up being a blip in the news due to said sinking.

* In June 2023 there were two maritime incidents. The first was the shipwreck of a boat full of migrants off the coast of Greece, with hundreds feared dead. Days later, an [=OceanGate=] submersible named Titan disappeared in the Atlantic with 5 people aboard. While both received media attention, the Titan's disappearance received far more coverage, in part because of it's passengers (including a British billionaire and the CEO of [=OceanGate=]), as well as the fact that the Titan was on an expedition to the resting place of the Titanic. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-migrants-boat-sinking-titanic-submersive-missing-rcna90336 Several organizations criticized this]] because they felt that more attention and resources were being given to a submersible carrying a few rich tourists than to a boat filled with hundreds of migrants fleeing their country.

** In a slight reverse of this, the lead news story for the week of October 30, 2017 was the unsealing of indictments in Robert Mueller's investigation into the Russian meddling, leading to two arrests and one guilty plea. Creator/FoxNews, meanwhile, covered Google's new cheeseburger emoji, which had the [[FauxHorrific cheese under the patty]], rather than on top.
** In a similar case, as an FBI raid on UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump's lawyer occupied the news on April 9, 2018, Tucker Carlson devoted much of his Creator/FoxNews show to a story about "aggressive, sex-crazed" [[PandaingToTheAudience pandas]].

* April 4, 2023, was a historic day for America. [[UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump Donald Trump]] became the first former president to be arrested, having been charged with 43 felony counts. On the same day, the second trailer for ''Film/{{Barbie|2023}}'' was released. Guess which story got more coverage on social media?

* April 4, 2023, was a historic day for America. [[UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump Donald Trump]] became the first former president to be arrested, having been charged with 43 felony counts. On the same day, the second trailer for ''Film/{{Barbie}}'' was released. Guess which story got more coverage on social media?

* April 4, 2023, was a historic day for America. [[UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump]] became the first former president to be arrested, having been charged with 43 felony counts. On the same day, the second trailer for ''Film/{{Barbie}}'' was released. Guess which story got more coverage on social media?

* In October 2008, the world's financial system was in full-blown recession mode, the US Presidential race was reaching its conclusion and there was an armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Which of those was gobbling up news coverage in the United Kingdom? Erm, none of those - it was actually [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russell_Brand_Show_prank_calls_row four phone calls]] aired on a BBC Radio Two programme which received little attention at the time; it probably would have stayed that way had ''The Mail on Sunday'' not picked up on it ''a week'' after they had been aired, having been ignored by their sister paper the ''Daily Mail''.

* Instead of airing Queen Elizabeth II's funeral like most channels, Channel 5 in the UK aired several animated movies (seemingly viewing it as a common or garden bank holiday). They were also the first of the major British broadcasters to revert to their normal schedule, doing so at ''9pm that day'', less than three hours after her death was announced.
** Something similar happened in the United States, when CBS [[https://nypost.com/2022/09/19/critics-rip-cbs-over-decision-to-cut-queens-funeral-to-air-game-shows/ prematurely ended its coverage]] of the funeral to air ''Series/LetsMakeADeal'' and ''Series/ThePriceIsRight''.
** Ironically, the exact opposite was accused of happening with most channels, with many complaints rolling in about the coverage being so excessive that even Sky Sports channels all switched to wall to wall coverage of the funeral at the expense of literally anything else.

* On December 29, 2020, a major magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Croatia, with the epicenter near the town of Petrinja, killing 7 people and injuring 26 others. The story was almost entirely ignored by the media outside Croatia, as the media was still focusing on a December 25 car bombing in Nashville. Twitter was of no help either, as "Croatia" only ranked at #25 in the top trending words, beaten out by, among others, [[https://www.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/lrn6e1/dream_stan_starterpack/ a series of random letters being tweeted by "stans" of a certain group of Minecraft YouTubers]].

* [[Music/VanHalen Eddie Van Halen]] was a legend in the music world. He is considered one of the all-time greatest guitar players in rock history, and popularized the tapping guitar solo technique. He and Van Halen are among the best-selling groups of all time, and is tied for the most multi-platinum albums by an American band. Unfortunately, he had the misfortune of his 2020 death being overshadowed in the headlines by, among other things, continuing coverage of the 2020 Beirut explosion and the George Floyd protests, and thus his death was largely ignored by most news outlets outside of music-related sites.

* On April 15, 2019, the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, two of the most important sites for two of the world's major religions, both caught on fire, but guess which one was covered most in Western media? (Although the Notre Dame fire also did a lot more damage to the site than the Al-Aqsa one, which could account for some of the disparity.) Native American activists also noted how the fire at Notre Dame [[https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/4/17/18412307/notre-dame-native-american-activists-sacred-lands received much less attention than the desecration of Native American sacred sites]].
* There's a noticeable difference in the coverage of American cable news networks from international channels like [[Creator/TheBBC BBC World News]], France 24, DW or Al Jazeera. The former tends to concentrate on American politics to the exclusion of international stories, and international news channels have coverage that is more, well, international.

* Hurricane Dorian in 2019 was the worst hurricane to hit the Bahamas in a generation and also struck parts of the eastern seaboard. What was the public’s mind largely focused on at the time? Hurricane Dorian... well, not the actual destruction of the storm, but rather a minor scandal where President Donald Trump accidentally tweeted Alabama was at risk of being hit and afterwards infamously tried to prove with a sharpie over a map that there was a chance it could hit the state. Granted, this happened at the same time as the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires, which also overshadowed such stories as the deaths of Music/TheCars vocalist Ric Ocasek, voice actor Robert Axelrod, and screenwriter Mardik Martin; a Saudi airstrike on a detention center in Dhamar, Yemen that killed 100 people; two car bombings in Kabul, Afghanistan; the sinking of MV ''Conception''; and xenophobia-fuelled riots in Johannesburg, South Africa.

-->"Who's idea was it to do a story? Story about what? As you can see, there's construction. They've dug out a li'l bit, there's water has, uh, has accumulated, traffic's backed up. In a city the size of Huston, here's ALWAYS traffic! So what's the big fuckin' deal!? What in the fuck are we doin' out here!? I ask you: What. In. The. Fuck. Are. We. Doing. Here? Hell, I don't know."

* The Westminster vehicular assault attack of March 22, 2017 went virtually under the radar in the United States, where news coverage was monopolized by the many scandals of the Trump administration, including the Obama wiretap claims, the Russia investigation, the American Health Care Act, and the Neil Gorsuch hearings. The Manchester bombings of May 2017, on the other hand, averted this fate, as it quickly took center stage worldwide. This is because the Manchester attack had a higher body count and occurred at a concert of Music/ArianaGrande, a very popular American pop singer (which heightened the story's visibility stateside) -- not to mention the victims largely being youth.

* On October 17, 1992, unarmed Japanese exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori was shot and killed by a Baton Rouge homeowner who mistook him for a burglar or some other criminal. The contrast between the news coverage in the United States and Japan was stark: in the former, the story was regarded as tragic but all too commonplace to rate serious attention, while in Japan there was a nationwide outcry.

* News coverage of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016, like Sandy, happened at the peak of the election cycle (although this time not the week right before the election). Unlike with Joaquin a year earlier, Matthew actually ended up being a threat to American land. And like the Orlando nightclub massacre during the summer, a Donald Trump-related story quickly overshadowed it (and this time, one completely unrelated to the story it replaced); in this case, the release of an 11-year old tape of Trump making misogynistic comments about Arianne Zucker on the set of ''Access Hollywood''. A leak of a batch of Hillary Clinton emails by [=WikiLeaks=] (again, helped by Russia) were released the same day as the Trump video, but it went virtually unnoticed compared to the massive media circus caused the latter (which has been a trend between coverage of the two candidates throughout the entire election cycle). Even people who agreed the Oregon shooting story took media priority over Joaquin the previous year thought the Trump story was being blown out of proportion and that Matthew was actually important.

* On July 18, 2016 a lone-wolf terrorist on a train in Germany attacked people with an axe, injuring four people before he was killed by police, but for those living in Cleveland, Ohio and in fact most of the United States, that story was totally ignored by the presence of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which every local news channel was covering the course of the whole week. It even dwarfed a shooting at an anti-violence rally in nearby Euclid, Ohio and the death of TV actor and producer Garry Marshall. The shooting at a Munich [=McDonald's=] four days later, on the other hand, quickly took center stage, as, aside from the Republican convention being over by that point, the shooting was actually deadly, having killed nine people. Making matters worse, however, was the fact that the gunman was targeting children.

* The Nice, France truck incident of July 14, 2016 would be somewhat overshadowed by news media within 24 hours by an attempted military coup in Turkey. This was subverted on social media, however, where Nice was for the most part the bigger story of the two (not that Turkey didn't get its fair share of attention either).

* Something worth noting is that after massacres like Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine, San Bernardino, or Orlando - basically any mass murder where the incident is a shooting - most American news media uses these events to debate over gun control rather than whatever factors may have motivated the shooter. Charleston was the exception to the rule, as the discussion that followed that was instead focused on racism.

* Gordie Howe was a legend in the world of ice hockey. Even if he wasn't ''quite'' at the level of Wayne Gretzky, he was still one of the most respected names in the industry. Unfortunately, he had the misfortune of dying shortly after Muhammad Ali and Kimbo Slice, the former of who was an even bigger icon (and about fifteen years younger) and the latter who, while more of an cult name in the MMA world, died at the young age of 42. But then, Howe's death was completely overshadowed by the murder of pop singer Christina Grimmie at a concert in Orlando, Florida. Grimmie was largely unknown to the greater public, being mostly recognized for her stint on ''Series/TheVoice'', but she had a cult fanbase on Website/YouTube. But she was only 22 when she was shot and killed by a fan (possibly an ex-boyfriend) after a concert. While Howe's death was sad, it was hardly surprising as he was 88. This wasn't about Howe having less recognition than Grimmie so much as the fact that the latter's death was a shocking murder that ''nobody saw coming''. Also not helping Howe's case were the other major news stories surrounding it, namely the announcement of UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton as the Democratic presumptive nominee for the U.S. presidential election and the controversy surrounding the sentence of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner for sexual assault. However, all of these stories were eventually overshadowed by the Orlando nightclub shooting, as it was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The shooting also made the deaths of legendary voice actress Janet Waldo and (in a lesser way) of Michu Meszaros, the actor that portrayed ''Series/{{Alf}}'' in costume (in which the few outlets that did cover Michu's death set up their reporting in a way ''that implied that ALF puppeteer Paul Fusco had died''), complete afterthoughts outside of television-related sites, though they wouldn't have been front page news anyway.

* Wrestling/{{Chyna}} and Music/{{Prince}} died on the same day in 2016. Coverage of Prince completely eclipsed that of Chyna. Although Chyna's death could be considered more "shocking" than Prince's because she was 12 years younger than him, Prince is far more widely known to the general public. Prince's death also overshadowed a series of drug-related murders in rural Ohio and a mass kidnapping in South Sudan. While all death is tragic, Prince's was due to natural causes rather than intentional murder.

* After the failed assassination attempt on UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan in 1981, news agencies across the United States reported that he had not been hit. This is perhaps the biggest example of misreporting a major news story in American history. [[http://youtu.be/-B9nVmQOlRU?t=3m58s Here]] you can see ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds reporting that he wasn't wounded, and then ''seconds later'' the revelation that yes, he was. "The president has not been wounded... He was wounded? My god! The president was hit? He's in stable condition, all this information!" Actually, he was undergoing major, potentially life-threatening surgery to remove the bullet at the time. Additionally, later all three networks and CNN reported erroneously that White House Press Secretary James Brady (who had suffered a head wound that left him confined to a wheelchair) had died (with new Creator/{{CBS}} Evening News anchor Dan Rather actually announcing a moment of silence). Also, at one point an equally inaccurate report stating that Reagan had died was reported before that was corrected. When the erroneous announcement of Brady's death was corrected and sent to Reynolds[[note]]possibly including a correction by Frank's son, Dean; who was working for the UPI newswire at the time[[/note]]; Reynolds finally blew up; screaming at staffers to "... get it straight so we can report this thing accurately".

* On March 5 every year in the UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom, well, it seems to be the day for this. Celebrity news and so-called funny stories dominate the headlines, with everything else... well, sidelined.

** [[http://www.projectcensored.org/ Project Censored]] annually complies a list of stories it says were the most ignored and/or underreported by the mainstream media during the past year; the 2011 top "ignored" story was "More soldiers committed suicide than died in combat in 2010." Supporters say that pop culture, personality features and "chicken dinner" stories with little or no actual headline value get preference over the actual stories.

* On October 28, 2022, a man broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband, a major story, especially coming so close to the midterm eleections. The front page of ''The New York Times'' had it as a ''below the fold'' short story with the top ones ranging from the economy to Elon Musk buying Twitter, the death of Jerry Lee Lewis and the page dominated by a photo of new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at home with his daughter and discussing his private wealth.

* Instead of airing Queen Elizabeth II's funeral like most channels, Channel 5 in the UK aired several animated movies (seemingly viewing it as a common or garden bank holiday).

* This sometimes cannot be avoided, often when a major news event occurs just as the paper is about to go to press. Unwilling to recompose the layout, some editors will simply drop the major event in a corner and leave the rest of the front page intact. The same thing can happen with news magazines which are written well ahead of being put on shelves. In other words, something similar to AnimationLeadTime. For example, the [[http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr_archive.asp?fpVname=IL_DCN&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=4 May 2nd 2011 edition of the Danville Commercial-News]] led with an article about a local shopping mall agreement, relegating the death of UsefulNotes/OsamaBinLaden to a single column halfway down the right of the page.

** Something similar happened in the United States, when CBS [[https://nypost.com/2022/09/19/critics-rip-cbs-over-decision-to-cut-queens-funeral-to-air-game-shows/ prematurely ended its coverage]] of the funeral to air ''Series/LetsMakeADeal'' and ''Series/ThePriceIsRight''.

* Instead of airing Queen Elizabeth II's funeral like most channels, Channel 5 in the UK aired several animated movies.
** Something similar happened in the United States, when CBS [[https://nypost.com/2022/09/19/critics-rip-cbs-over-decision-to-cut-queens-funeral-to-air-game-shows/ prematurely ended its' coverage]] of the funeral to air ''Series/LetsMakeADeal'' and ''Series/ThePriceIsRight''.