Worst News Judgment Ever / Live-Action TV

Examples of the Worst News Judgment Ever in Live-Action TV series.

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Networks:

• HLN. Critics contend this spinoff news network of CNN places heavy emphasis on events or items of little to no news value — fluff human interest items, "Missing White Woman Syndrome" cases and "humorous" police news, dubious medical/consumer news and/or advice, "fads," Hollywood/sports news and rumors, overblown coverage of certain criminal trials (e.g., Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias), and confrontational editorializing — over-serious investigative/watchdog journalism and commentary.
  • This is also heavy Network Decay at work— HLN was once known as "Headline News", which was just that, a constantly-going roundup of all the headlines, no sensationalism necessary, compartmentalized into a 30-minute wheel format. This was useful for people in airports and bars, and for TV stations in need of cheap news coverage (even some PBS stations aired it). But as the Internet came along and stole the network's cachet, it had to adjust to stay relevant. At first, it wasn't too bad (the first major revamp in 1999 merely split the network's schedule into 4 color-coded dayparts), but by the mid 2000s they had added longform programming under the "Headline Prime" banner, and it all went downhill from there. Hell, nowadays the Network Decay's gotten so bad you're more likely to see a rerun of Forensics Files than anything else, least especially news.

Series:

• The first season of 24, which was still in production when the 9/11 attacks happened, has a plane explode in midair in the first episode, and then drop off the news cycles very rapidly (and being replaced with "Super Tuesday Coverage") for obvious reasons. Later seasons somewhat avert this though.
• Angel:
  • Lindsey's law firm promoting him to senior partner apparently got actual news coverage.
  • The part where a minor heiress had her picture shown in a major fashion magazine in such a way to also include her father's bodyguard, a person who Cordelia is looking for when she conveniently decides to take a break and look through a magazine instead. Biggest Ass Pull ever.
• Just about every instance of the Bluth family landing itself in legal trouble on Arrested Development makes the nightly news. Reporter John Beard wants to be sure viewers know "What this means for your weekend!"
• Babylon 5. Londo is visibly annoyed when the article on him becoming Emperor of the Centauri is overshadowed by banner headlines about comedy duo Rebo and Zooty.
• Played for Laughs on Boy Meets World, where the news of Cory and Topanga's breakup takes up the whole front page of the school newspaper.
• Several of The Chaser's series have parodied this or poked fun at actual examples:
  • CNNNN parodied this in the wake of a scandal surrounding AFL star Wayne Carey with "Iraq war continues, Melbourne newspaper struggles for Carey angle" in the news crawl.
  • In the episode of The Chaser's War On Everything following Chas Licciardello's arrest for selling fake weapons outside a Canterbury Bulldogs game, Chas pointed out that this had been the top story on 2UE, followed by Hezbollah declaring war on Israel.
  • In Yes We Canberra, Chas and Andrew made fun of National Nine News ignoring Tony Abbott's announcement of his plan for mental health, in favour of covering Tony Abbott burning his budgie smugglers on talkback radio.
  • The Hamster Wheel had a segment on bizarre approaches to weather reporting, beginning with a news bulletin whose top story was Sydney being lashed by wild winds with a possible cold snap on the way, while the second was another Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan.
• Played with occasionally on The Colbert Report since the show won a Peabody award. Colbert will mention the Peabody at the top of the show, and lead into more "award-winning journalism" — only for the top story to be the most irrelevant garbage he could find. (They can't retract the award, so why not?)
• The fact that both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have won Peabodies for outstanding excellence in journalism means they have to try that much harder to remind people that they are both comedy shows. As far as Jon Stewart and the real Stephen Colbert are concerned, they'd rather the awards go to actual news organizations. For added irony value, the Stephen Colbert character is, in large part, a parody of Bill O'Reilly who, on multiple occasions, has been caught claiming to have won not one, but two, Peabodies in spite of the fact that he never actually did. (The Peabodies are given out to shows across the entire medium of television, and there are no limits to the awards that can be given.)
• Parodied on Corner Gas, where the local Dog River Howler is deliberately, ridiculously sensationalist; for example, when the town gets stop signs at an intersection, the headline is "Crosswalk Hell". Many characters make it a point to skip right by the front page to find something interesting.
• The short-lived sitcom DAG has a Secret Service agent leaping the opposite direction away from the President during a shooting. Granted, that would be notable and it's logical that he would be made fun of during talk shows, etc. But that his gaffe ends up on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and other magazines and international news broadcasts make him their top story seems a bit much. Not to mention how throughout the season, as Daggett protects the First Lady, all the media coverage is on him more than her.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • In "Rabbit in a Snowstorm", New York Bulletin executive editor Mitchell Ellison stops into Ben Urich's office to discuss the next week's edition:
    Mitchell Ellison: You got a minute? Talk about next week's spread?
    Ben Urich: Already working on it.
    Mitchell Ellison: Another organized crime thing?
    Ben Urich: All of Hell's Kitchen. There's a new player on the scene. No one knows who it is, or what they want. Everybody's scrambling.
    Mitchell Ellison: Your assignment's the City desk, Ben.
    Ben Urich: This is the city! [gets up from his desk] No one else is on this yet! I'm the only one who sees it.
    Mitchell Ellison: It's not sexy.
    Ben Urich: We're a newspaper, Ellison. Not a girly mag.
    Mitchell Ellison: You know that's not what I meant. And nobody calls them that anymore.
    Ben Urich: It's not just the Russians. I think maybe the Union Allied scandal might tie into this.
    Mitchell Ellison: Right, and you remember what that exposé did for circulation? Dick, with a side of "who gives a shit".
    Ben Urich: This is a real story!
    Mitchell Ellison: Yeah, and it's gonna end the same as it always does, right? A bunch of fat old guys and some white collar person with more fat old guys.
    Ben Urich: The cops aren't even on this yet! We could be the ones to connect the dots-
    Mitchell Ellison: It doesn't sell papers, Ben! Not anymore! [hands Ben a manila folder] I want you on the subway line piece. [Ben takes the folder and skims the contents with increasing disdain]
    Ben Urich: "Rumors Bubbling: Will Hell's Kitchen Finally Get a Subway Line?" Come on! We tell that every year!
    Mitchell Ellison: And every year it kills.
    Ben Urich: For a fluff piece.
    Mitchell Ellison: You know, you like to be on the ground, right? You like to talk to people. Take a poll! What color do they like? Y'know, we've got a blue line, we've got a yellow line, we're running out of colors.
    Ben Urich: Like M&Ms?
    Mitchell Ellison: Yeah, see? Write the hell out of it.
    Ben Urich: [steps up to Ellison] There used to be a time when the people in this building wrote the hell out of the news.
    Mitchell Ellison: Everybody we know is making twice what we are, writing from blogs, working from home in their underwear. We're hanging on by our fingertips, Ben. Do you really want to be greasing that ledge?
    • At the end of the episode, when Karen Page visits Ben at his office, the copy on his desk shows the subway story got buried in the back pages, right on the same page as a "rescued cat" story.
  • At one point, Urich accuses Ellison of being paid off by Wilson Fisk and ensuring that his remaining career is limited to fluff pieces. After Fisk kills Urich, Karen angrily confides in Matt that Ellison shouldn't have even been at Urich's funeral pretending to be his friend. The arrests, however, prove that Ellison is not complicit.
• Doctor Who: In "The War Machines", the death of a tramp makes the front page of The Times. Actual deaths in 1966 included writers Evelyn Waugh and C.S. Forester, actors Buster Keaton and Montgomery Clift, comedian Lenny Bruce, and Captain Cook's 200-year-old tortoise. Their deaths did not make the front page of The Times.
• In The Flash, there's a newspaper from the future that the heroes use to judge timeline changes, whose headline reads "Flash Missing: Vanishes In Crisis." Fair enough, but one headline from further in the future reads "25 Years Later - Flash Still Missing" in equally humongazoid print. Apparently, that someone who's been missing for decades still hasn't miraculously turned up is the biggest news in Central City. Yeah, the Flash is the city's hero and the 25th anniversary of his vanishing might get some mention, but it's rather like the biggest story in a Real Life newspaper being that yes, the Titanic still, in fact, sank.
• The Golden Girls: In one episode, Rose auditions for a news reporter job by covering a dog show. An armed robber breaks into the dog show, and Rose insists upon getting the story. By that, she means ignoring the robbery entirely and sticking to her original story about people who look like their pets, interviewing terrified dog owners as gunshots go off in the background.
• The Goodies. In "War Babies" banner headlines declare that a woman has given birth to a full-sized Bill Oddie, whilst in a tiny corner of the newspaper is the news that World War II has just started.
• Several episodes of Have I Got News for You have coincided with a week of very slow news, with the result being that normally insignificant stories get higher prominence; one example was series 36 episode 6, where the stories in the second round consisted of a haunted sofa, a drawing of a spider somebody had sent as payment for a gas bill, a woman who'd been training for a mission to the South Pole by sitting in a refrigerator and a man who'd converted a double-decker bus into an "all mod cons base for holidays". The two regular panellists, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, spent the entire round in sheer disbelief of the worthlessness of the "stories".
• Lampshaded on Home and Away when Robbie couldn't believe that the front page story in The Coastal News was a planned resort for the bay being announced, only a day after the apparent death of serial killer Eve Jacobsen/Zoe MacCallister, AKA the Summer Bay Stalker.
• Used as the big clue in a Jonathan Creek episode. Tourists have taken footage of the still living murder victim in the park while someone reads that morning's newspaper. The editor of the local newspaper was in on the plot and produced a copy of the newspaper front page ahead of time to film the victim before she was murdered. They then staged the story in the pre-printed headline. This explained why a big story was bumped to the third page.
• Parodied in Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  • In one sketch, a character reads a newspaper which has an advert for a breakfast cereal as the banner headline and main story, with "World War III declared" squashed in the bottom of the page.
  • In another episode:
    "Well, everyone is talking about the Third World War which broke out this morning. But here on Nationwide we're going to get away from that a bit and look instead at the latest theory that sitting down regularly in a comfortable chair can rest your legs."
• Season 2 of The Morning Show is set in early 2020, with the news show's producers brushing off concerns about the coronavirus outbreak in China. A reporter stuck in the lockdowns tells producer Mia this is becoming a bigger deal but she answers how no one in a vibrant New York City cares about some virus in China. Granted, this is with major news stories happening, yet it takes the lockdown of New York City for them to realize they were ignoring the biggest news story in a decade.
• Murphy Brown:
  • A recurring bit would be Murphy and her gang grousing on how the networks ignored hard-hitting stories for "fluff" pieces.
  • In her early days, Corky was clearly meant to just be good-looking and create such pieces to bring in bigger ratings. She did turn into a serious reporter as the series went on.
  • One episode has Murphy fighting to get an exclusive interview with an quirky pop singer at his theme park-like mansion. Just as it's about to go on the air, word comes of a U.S. aircraft carrier attacked. While grousing over losing the interview, Murphy knows this is a far more important story and gets ready to cover it. To her shock, the network agents insist the interview go on and Niles and Murphy can't believe they're choosing the interview with the network agents saying "there is a major news story and this is it." Murphy starts it off by telling the viewers what's happening and "for further details, I suggest you switch to another station. But if you're more interested in the over-indulged lifestyle of a pampered pop music star, you're in the right place."
• In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode "Girl In Gold Boots", one of the characters in the movie robs a gas station. Later, he is seen laughing as he reads about it in the newspaper. Mike Nelson comments, "Yeah, front page of the L.A. Times—forty-dollar robbery, nobody hurt!" This is actually something of a Running Gag on MST3K, as the mock-up newspapers used in old movies tend to have extremely bland filler stories on the front page alongside the plot-related headline (and of course the guys lampshade it). Further details can be found on the Wikia page "New Petitions Against Tax".
• Played for Laughs in an episode of the [adult swim] series Newsreaders. A segment is given to a story about the creator of "Motorboating Dads", a new parenting method designed to teach young boys how to grow up to be womanizing douchebags. At the end of the segment, the man states that if what he is doing is so evil, then he challenges a time traveler to kill him as if he were Hitler. After a few moments of confidence in the fact that he must be right, since no time traveling assassins came back to kill him, the segment ends right as one appears. Lampshaded immediately.
  Thanks, but I think you missed the bigger story there.
• In The Orville episode "Lasting Impressions", the crew finds a time capsule from 2015. Ed and Kelly are shown reading a newspaper, and Ed complains that society was "on the verge of climate collapse and they dedicate an entire page to teeth whitening."
• One episode of Parks and Recreation features a copy of the local paper with a headline announcing the arrival of spring. "Most residents welcome the new season."
• Powerless (2017): The final news report of "Win, Luthor, Draw" glosses over the fact that the GOP refused to impeach President Lex Luthor for nearly destroying the world in favor of a news report on a panda that can make jewelry, which the newscaster may or may not be advertising.
• In the second series of Prison Break, it seems unlikely that the Fox River Eight would receive so much media attention considering the President of the United States died in suspicious circumstances on the night of their escape. One prisoner was convicted of killing the new President's brother, which would hype the prison break story. Still, given a headline of "President Dies" or "Eight Escape Prison" it isn't hard to figure which should have gotten the headline. Also, a few of the later news stories were placed as traps by the FBI.
• In an episode of The Real Mccoys, the news of grandpa being arrested for burning his trash was all over the headlines. An old man going to jail for burning his trash, the most important thing going on that day.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • An episode hosted by Conan O'Brien contained a skit about the career of a boxer from the early 20th century. It ended with a headline about his retirement but under that was a small blurb about the beginning of World War I.
  • A 1980 SNL sketch spoofed the concept by having a panel of journalists discussing the big issues of the day. The catch was that four of the five reporters were from supermarket tabloids. Buck Henry's character, a serious journalist from a legitimate publication, was increasingly dumbfounded by the others' dismissal of important issues such as the upcoming election and the state of the nation's economy in favor of alien encounters and Elvis sightings.
  • Back in the '70s, there were months of daily reports in the "legitimate" media that Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still alive (at least until his death). At that point, Saturday Night Live weekly anchor Chevy Chase announced every week that Generalísimo Francisco Franco was still dead. This was invoked by The Colbert Report and other satirical news outlets with the death of Osama bin Laden.
  • In another Weekend Update sketch, one host began to read about the story of the death of Pope John Paul, only to toss away the news brief he was reading on because he thought the story was from briefs from last month.^note John Paul I died within in a month of becoming Pope. The joke of course being that the news had covered the events surrounding his ascent so toughly, he thought it was some attempt to breath new life into the story. Made even funnier, as his successor, John Paul II, would become the second longest living pope in the history of the church.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017): The Daily Punctillio will waste front pages on what is "in" at that very moment. And that's when it's not just printing outright lies without bothering to do an ounce of fact-checking.
• Smallville:
  • There's an episode where the entire front page of the Daily Planet was devoted to a bank robbery. The commentary track joked about how you don't get a font that big unless the world is ending.
  • Another episode had the Daily Planet featuring Lois Lane's historical report on a former hero society up on the front page. Apparently nothing happened anywhere in the world that day.
  • Nicely averted in one "Asylum", where eagle eyed viewers noticed a headline that was hugely relevant to the world, but completely irrelevant to the episode's plot: "Themysciran Queen Addresses the Vatican".
• Discussed on Star Trek: Voyager when Neelix launches "A Briefing with Neelix" (later changed to "Good Morning, Voyager) which he originally intends to be an entertaining fluff show. Harry Kim, who was an Intrepid Reporter at Starfleet Academy, explains to Neelix how journalists are supposed to do their jobs; this helps set a series of events into motion that leads to Neelix helping to expose a traitor on Voyager.
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip takes place in a world where the revelation of a decade-old drunk driving arrest of a network executive (not star... executive) is able to hit the top of the news-cycle... Can most people even name a single network executive?
• The short-lived sci-fi series Threshold touched on this when a sardonic scientist notes "the day the Mars probe landed, one of the greatest achievements in human history, you know what the lead story of every newscast that night was? Britney Spears married in Vegas."
• Likewise, on The West Wing, the panic over the photographs of Sam with his High-Class Call Girl friend Laurie already seems slightly out of proportion. Now, sure, we can just about accept that Sam is a well-known face in the universe of The West Wing. However, in real life, most people probably don't know that there is such a job position as a White House Deputy Communications Director, or who fills it...and then C.J. announces that the paper they were sold to is The Daily Mirror, a British tabloid. For the record, in order for the British tabloids to care about an American speechwriter's platonic hug with a prostitute, they would have to have run through not only every scandal they could unearth about their own government and celebrities, but every scandal they could make up about their own government and celebrities.
  • Invoked by CJ in "The State Dinner" when reporters for fashion magazines are given press passes to cover the titular dinner. The fashion writers only ask about what the officials will be wearing and have no interest in any of the other issues the White House are dealing with.
    CJ: A hurricane's picked up speed and power and is heading for Georgia. Management and labor are coming here to work out a settlement to avoid a crippling strike that will begin at midnight tonight. And the government's planning a siege on 18 to 40 of its citizens, all the while we host a state dinner for the President of Indonesia...Amazingly, you know what I'll get asked most often today? (to reporter) Black suede and velvet Manolo Blahnik slides with a rhinestone and mother of pearl toe buckle.
• The Wire uses the trope seriously a few times in season five, once The Baltimore Sun is introduced into the mix:
  • Alma Gutierrez's piece about a triple homicide gets drastically cut down and moved to the Metro section, below the fold. If you look very closely you can see some of the stories that made the front page, and they include a fluff piece about a skydiving company. Michael Fletcher explicitly tells Alma that it's quite simple: the victims were black in the wrong zipcode.
  • This initially stymies Jimmy McNulty's efforts to publicize his made-up serial killer, as part of a scheme to bring in extra funding for the police department. He does an interview for Alma, but the Sun buries the article deep inside the paper below a story about a school name change, because the "victims" (who actually died of natural causes and were staged post-mortem) are homeless. McNulty and Lester Freamon have to add a sexual element to the killings and try again to get the results he wants.
  • The death of Omar is an epic moment in the show's history. All it gets in the paper is a brief mention of just another street shooting with none of the paper's reporters having the street experience to realize a major player in the Baltimore crime world has just been cut down and will shake things up majorly.

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