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If It Bleeds, It Leads
- 393 statements
- 73 feature instances
- 71 referencing feature instances
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A basic fact in the news media is that, if a story involves a brutal death or injury of some kind (or the likelihood of it), it is likely to get higher ratings. The more lurid the story, the better its chances of being the ratings leader. Natural disasters, bank robberies, shootouts, rapes, serial killers, Gangbangers, school violence, and animal maulings all draw an army of news vans the same way that a limping gazelle draws a pride of lions, except the gazelle is already dead and the lions are broadcasting images of its dead body to thousands, if not millions. By doing so, the news media are following a decades-old mantra: "if it bleeds, it leads!" This mantra is deeply ingrained in journalistic norms. Newsworthiness is determined by several factors, and death/destruction fulfills many of them a lot better than news about society working its wonders another day. Also, because getting information on them is easy (through the police or government agencies via press releases) and since they take place on public streets where permits or business permission are never required to film near, they are generally rather cheap to cover. They also tend to provide flashy visuals. As a result of all this, Accentuate the Negative tends to be in full effect at many news desks. Just look at your average day's worth of coverage from CNN, Fox News or your nightly News Broadcast and count the number of stories (or rather, the amount of coverage) given to good news rather than disaster and criticism. Some have suggested that coverage like this, focusing on negative stories of war, death, and destruction rather than the positive things that are happening in society is responsible for making people cynical about the world around them. People who watch the news start to feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and give up on the idea that society's problems can be fixed. In addition, when the media obsess over violent crimes, deeper problems with society (such as cities running out of money) go ignored, leaving the public uninformed. Another, even darker effect of the news media's obsession with violence — and the one that is often emphasized in fiction — is the kind of message it sends out to impressionable viewers. By glorifying the actions of violent criminals, the media tell viewers, "Hey, if you go out and fire a machine gun into a crowd of little children, you too can make the national news!" Critics of this type of reporting often point out that it's hypocritical for the news media to accuse violent movies, music, and video games of making people violent when they're indulging in far more grisly and true-to-life stuff every night at 11 — stuff that is being plastered over countless TV screens, implicitly turning the perpetrators into celebrities. Additionally, it provides terrorists and other assorted nutjobs a very convenient stage from which to burn their name into the history books and/or spread fear and their political agendas by way of violence. The entire reason why Missing White Woman Syndrome exists, as well as the reason why the crimes on most Crime and Punishment Series are Always Murder. The Immoral Journalist is typically one of the most ardent believers in this concept. Compare Media Scaremongering, Could This Happen to You?. Contrast Human-Interest Story. When used in fiction, it's often a sign that the news outlet indulging in it is a Strawman News Media. Has nothing to do with a real Trail of Blood. Compare and contrast Yet Another Baby Panda, when viewer interest is teased by a cute fluffy story that usually comes at the end. |
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| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_15c6ea92 | type |
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Wonder Woman (1987): Cassie Arnold decides to take advantage of this to propel her career, by teaming up with a murderer masquerading as a hero in order to get the grisly scenes of his "rescues" before any other news teams, and often before the action even starts. | |
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| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_23595756 | comment |
The Pedestrian (1973): A newspaper has a big story, an expose of industrialist Heinz Linge as a Nazi war criminal, all lined up. But when they get a story about two people stabbing each other over a parking space, complete with gory picture, the Linge story is pushed to page 3. | |
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In Street Scene, Kaplan complains that the newspapers cover "notting but deevorce, skendal, and moiders." When Mrs. Maurrant and Sankey are murdered, a tabloid printed the same day depicts their last moments in a lurid "composograph" picture. | |
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In the Justice League episode "Wild Cards", the Joker broadcasts a threat to blow up the Vegas Strip unless the Justice League can stop him. As the drama plays out, other news broadcasters pick up the Joker's show... which feeds into his real plan to expose millions of viewers to Ace's insanity-inducing gaze. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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Discussed by Charlie Brooker on Newswipe. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_455e3038 | comment |
In the King of the Hill episode "Gone With the Windstorm", Nancy's news agency seemed more interested in broadcasting her near-death experience covering a forest fire than showing any concern for her well-being. When they find out their news van was on fire, a technician at the station was begging for the camera to show the burning van. When it is seen exploding on camera, the crew cheers. | |
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Discworld: Actually subverted in The Truth; a story about a stabbing, apparently committed by the ruler of the city at that, is ignored in favor of the latest Human-Interest Story about a parrot keepers' meeting or a humorously-shaped vegetable. Or completely untrue but not necessarily bloody stuff in the rival paper like someone being abducted by elves (though Discworld elves being what they are, that actually could be bloody) and a rain of frogs in Genua. Though played straight in Going Postal and Making Money; a newspaper called the Tanty Bugle (after the city's largest prison) got its popularity by reporting on murders, preferably horrible ones. Moist von Lipwig is a bit put out that his inventive but bloodless crimes only merited two paragraphs. |
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In Murphy Brown, after a gunman took the studio hostage during a live broadcast, producer Miles Silverberg was almost visibly drooling at the ratings numbers the hostage situation was raking in. Subverted in that, seconds after the gunman first showed his weapon, Miles secretly ordered the network to kill the signal, and played along like the cameras were still rolling in order to make the gunman think he was getting what he wanted. | |
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"Shoot 'Em Up" by Blue Stahli is about the media's tendency to treat mass murderers like celebrities. Bret wrote the song out of his disgust at seeing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone. | |
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Parodied multiple times in the Grand Theft Auto series. In San Andreas, field reporter Richard Burns complains about the lack of casualties during a news segment. Also in San Andreas, the ad bumper for one of the news reports announces "Prepare to be scared. The news is next." Really, all of the fake news programming in all of the GTA games is built around this trope. In Liberty City Stories, Ned Burner has Toni commit quite a few atrocities, including the murder of three celebrities and causing tons of damage and casualties with a fire truck, just so he can get good stories to cover. |
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S.O.B.: Felix's last words after being shot by the police is that his death will probably give the film some necessary publicity on the news. | |
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"Disco's Out, Murder's In" by Suicidal Tendencies is all about this. | |
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Roger Waters' album Amused to Death is a Concept Album about how television will be the bane of humanity, and so has several songs about this. | |
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One of the villains in Shark Night invokes the popularity of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel as proof that there is a market for his Snuff Film operation, in which he feeds people to sharks. | |
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Disturbed don't approve of this tendency at all. "Legion Of Monsters" is one big rant about how the glorification of mass shooters/terrorists only inspires more lunatics wanting their 15 minutes of fame. "The Vengeful One" touches on this topic as well, in the lyrics and in the music video. |
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Quantum Leap: In the episode "Temptation Eyes," this trope is invoked by the Motive Rant of the Chinatown Strangler, who is revealed to be Sam's leapee's reporting partner, who has been killing women to create a sensational story in order to keep his job. | |
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The mockumentary Medium Cool is about this. | |
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The Cuckoo's Calling: The suicide of supermodel Lula Landry attracts a media firestorm, which only worsens when evidence surfaces that it might not have been a suicide after all. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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In San Andreas, field reporter Richard Burns complains about the lack of casualties during a news segment. | |
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Christine (2016) is a dramatization of the last days of TV news reporter Christine Chubbuck, who is described in more detail below. In the movie, Michael, the manager at Christine's station cites this trope word-for-word when urging his reporting staff to get him juicier stories. Christine, who wants to focus on human-interest pieces, insists to Michael that what he wants is exploitative, to which he replies that the public she's concerned about are the avid consumers of these stories — she says that they as reporters should know better than the public, but he deems her attitude "superior". She eventually sits Michael down and seemingly reconciles with him, happily agreeing that his method of "sensationalizing the news" is the only way to get ratings and keep the station afloat. During the following broadcast, she announces that in keeping with the station's policy of presenting "the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts", viewers will now see "what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide." Christine then pulls out her revolver and shoots herself in the head. In the aftermath of the immediate panic, Michael reads from her desk notes and sees that she wrote out the script for the reporter who would take over for her after she was taken to the hospital, detailing her attempted suicide and current "critical" condition — clearly disturbed, he has to be asked multiple times by a police officer not to touch anything at the crime scene. | |
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Though played straight in Going Postal and Making Money; a newspaper called the Tanty Bugle (after the city's largest prison) got its popularity by reporting on murders, preferably horrible ones. Moist von Lipwig is a bit put out that his inventive but bloodless crimes only merited two paragraphs. | |
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Shadows of Doubt: The in-universe newspapers typically feature stories detailing whatever murders have recently taken place. Notably, this can include details that the player might have missed, making it potentially worthwhile to visit a newsstand and snag a copy after leaving your latest crime scene. | |
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In Twisted Fates, this is what Jerkass Paparazzi Reynard claims has got him going after the Twister case, although his true reason seems to be much more personal. | |
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In Network, Howard Beale's suicide threat causes ratings on his news show to jump, teaching his network this lesson. It leads to shows like The Mao Tse-Tung Hour, following a group of leftist revolutionaries based on the Symbionese Liberation Army. | |
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Batman: In the host's issue of Joker's Asylum, the Joker takes over a studio broadcasting a live game show and threatens the contestants with his lethal prank gadgets if they answer the increasingly impossible questions wrong. In the control booth, the producer practically drools over the prospect of the huge ratings this will bring in and refuses to intervene to stop him, up to telling his assistant to stall the police. But when one of the contestants gets a wrong answer, all that happens is that every single toy Joker uses is a perfectly normal novelty toy, so nobody's hurt. Much to the producer's horror, it turns out that the joke was actually on him; the Joker had wired the studio up to broadcast the audio from inside the control booth, meaning that his cynical, callous indifference to human life was broadcast to all the viewers he'd been desperately trying to keep. Who's the real monster: the criminal madman threatening hostages, the cynical producers broadcasting it just for ratings, or the people watching at home? | |
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During the "Hot Fuzz" side missions in Saints Row 2, the cameraman tagging along with you will occasionally quote this trope while you're driving. | |
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North Face offers a fairly stark take on it from a reporter: "You either need a glorious triumph or a horrible tragedy. An unspectacular retreat [from the mountain the main characters are trying to climb] is nothing more than a few lines on page 3." (He gets his horrible tragedy.) | |
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In Liberty City Stories, Ned Burner has Toni commit quite a few atrocities, including the murder of three celebrities and causing tons of damage and casualties with a fire truck, just so he can get good stories to cover. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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In Scream 2, the killer (at least, one of them) planned on invoking this in order to get himself media publicity and a sensational trial. The other killer, whose motivations were more personal, mocks his motivation as a product of The '90s before she shoots him. | |
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Scream 4's killer had a similar motivation. Jill would kill a bunch of people, then pin the murders on someone else and become the Final Girl in her own real-life slasher flick, riding it to book deals and TV appearances much like her older cousin Sidney had done. | |
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Referenced by name at the beginning of Delain's The Glory and the Scum ("We all live in unforgiving precarious ways / If it bleeds it leads is all we seem to hear today") | |
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"Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley is a biting take on this, and still relevant (although undercut somewhat by the events that inspired it — Henley's 1980 arrest on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and drug possession). Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet? Get the widow on the set, we need dirty laundry! |
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Kaeloo: Invoked. The main four want to start a news station, but since nothing interesting is happening, Mr. Cat deliberately instigates several violent incidents, including one with himself as the victim, and reports on these incidents on TV. The audience loves it. | |
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Satirized by The Onion, along with Missing White Woman Syndrome, in "Missing Girl Probably Raped." | |
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America (The Book) gives a huge Take That! to the news media for indulging in this, pointing out how they were busy covering the Kobe Bryant rape case and the final season of Friends while America was getting ready to invade Iraq. The same chapter gives a ratings scale for various scandals, rating it in Buttafuocos. | |
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Death Note has Hitoshi Demegawa, the director of Sakura TV who drops the trope name in the English dub of the anime when talking about the Kira case. After the Time Skip, he becomes the first of his mouthpieces, becoming a fervent worshiper of Kira, then using his name more as a means to raise money before being punished at the hands of the newest Kira, Teru Mikami. | |
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In Kimi No Na Iowa, one of the gripes of various characters is that the greater world quickly forgot about Imamura's troubles because a small town in the middle of nowhere disappearing due to a fatality-free disaster just doesn't get media attention. One mention outright states "no bleeding so it’s not surprising that it didn’t lead". | |
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The Scream franchise: In Scream (1996), this trope is personified with Gale Weathers, a tabloid reporter who cashed in on the murder of Sidney's mother by writing a bestselling book detailing her alternative theory of the case. In a subversion, it turns out that she was right, and that the accused killer Cotton Weary was innocent. Doesn't stop her from coming off like a sleazeball, though she does get better in the sequels. The reporter played by Linda Blair, is if anything worse: In Scream 2, the killer (at least, one of them) planned on invoking this in order to get himself media publicity and a sensational trial. The other killer, whose motivations were more personal, mocks his motivation as a product of The '90s before she shoots him. Scream 4's killer had a similar motivation. Jill would kill a bunch of people, then pin the murders on someone else and become the Final Girl in her own real-life slasher flick, riding it to book deals and TV appearances much like her older cousin Sidney had done. Also in Scream 4, we have the publicist version in Rebecca. When the killings get going, she's ecstatic as they will drive up the sales of Sidney's book. Sidney, traumatized by constantly being targeted by psychotic killers and trying to help her younger cousin whose friend was just killed, is not amused, and fires her on the spot when she tries to convince her to exploit her past trauma in order to make more money. |
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Discussed fairly heavily by Andrew in Monsters (2010) after Samantha asks him whether he's bothered by the fact that he profits from tragedy. | |
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Scary Movie: Gail Halestorm in the first movie is a parody of the aforementioned Gale Weathers, a reporter for Hard Cover (a parody of Hard Copy) who wrote a book called You're Dead, I'm Rich and heads to the Make-Out Point in the explicit hopes of filming somebody getting stabbed to death. Averted by the Black News van, who only briefly touch on the story then get the hell out of Dodge, since a pretty white woman just died and they're not sticking around to be accused of the crime (or maybe become the next victim). Purposely averted by the news station seen in the third movie. Despite the reporter Cindy Campbell urging them to cover the story of the killer videotape in which viewers are brutally murdered by a scary woman seven days after watching it, the station is only interested in covering fluff stories and stuff like breast implants. Then, once they finally become convinced of the tape's existence, they choose to play it. |
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In The Public Eye (1992), Joe Pesci plays Bernzy, a 1940's tabloid photographer. At one point someone mentions that guys like him always carry a pin in case they find an abandoned baby. They stick the baby with the pin before taking the picture because the newspapers pay extra for pictures of crying babies. | |
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Weight of the World: In The Charlatan of Choice, a mass grave is discovered under Atlas. VNN runs a story about it, and is about to show footage of the site before Nora turns the TV off. | |
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Actually subverted in The Truth; a story about a stabbing, apparently committed by the ruler of the city at that, is ignored in favor of the latest Human-Interest Story about a parrot keepers' meeting or a humorously-shaped vegetable. Or completely untrue but not necessarily bloody stuff in the rival paper like someone being abducted by elves (though Discworld elves being what they are, that actually could be bloody) and a rain of frogs in Genua. | |
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Babylon Bee: Mocked during a period where news media outlets were warning about the possibility of "incel shooters" because of the release of the movie Joker: "Media Horrified By Lack Of Violence At Joker Screenings" | |
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In Scream (1996), this trope is personified with Gale Weathers, a tabloid reporter who cashed in on the murder of Sidney's mother by writing a bestselling book detailing her alternative theory of the case. In a subversion, it turns out that she was right, and that the accused killer Cotton Weary was innocent. Doesn't stop her from coming off like a sleazeball, though she does get better in the sequels. | |
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Nightcrawler is about a video journalist who sells footage of grisly crime scenes to the TV stations to air on their news broadcasts, and is willing to go to any length to get that footage. The film is a commentary on how this attitude warps people, with Nina, the news director at Channel 6, shown to be just as amoral as the Villain Protagonist Lou Bloom. It's even noted in one scene that crime rates in Los Angeles are going down, which threatens the bread-and-butter of Channel 6's news operation. This very trope is name-dropped in the movie as the actually guiding philosophy of the videojournalist profession. | |
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The Shipping News: At the Gammy Bird, a rinky-dink newspaper serving a rinky-dink Newfoundland town: "We run a front-page photo of a car wreck every week, whether we have a wreck or not." | |
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In Indigenous, the news chopper locates one of the survivors, Elena, but doesn't land because they're milking the exclusive footage. Unfortunately, the chupacabra catch up to Elena. The live footage is part of what breaks the masquerade. | |
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The Night Flier: This is the entire tactic of the tabloid magazine Inside View. The gorier and grislier the crimes they report are, the more issues it will sell. At one point the editor boasts that he hopes the mystery killer claims more victims. | |
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Duckman: Duckman accidentally saves the President from a deranged gunman (he got slapped into the would-be assassin by a woman he groped), only to find that the press is only interested in talking to the gunman. When he points this out, the reporters just scoff and complain he only got in the way of a bigger story. Duckman only gets press coverage himself when his skeevy behavior is exposed on an interview show, which was staged by his new agent, who knowingly leaked footage of Duckman groping the woman for this exact reason. In one episode, a news crew film a postal worker on a killing spree, knowingly not stopping a customer from going inside and defends this with "journalistic integrity". |
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Michigan: Report From Hell: Ann Anderson is the biggest Jerkass out of all the reporters you work with, and firmly believes in this. When the crew encounters a monster that's eating a woman alive, Ann berates them for trying to save the victim rather than keeping their camera firmly focused on the dying girl. The player can later choose to let Ann be devoured by that very same monster; if they save her, Ann promptly complains that you should have gotten more footage first. | |
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Natural Born Killers is a ruthless satire of this trope, focusing on a pair of Bonnie and Clyde-esque spree killers who engage in their crimes in order to get media attention. | |
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The Black Dahlia: The police try to prevent word of Elizabeth Short's grisly murder from getting out because they know that beautiful women who get horrifically murdered are frequently used to sell lots of papers. Naturally, it's not long before there's a leak that turns the case into a media circus. | |
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Invoked in The Wire by detectives Freamon and McNulty as part of their fake serial killer scheme; they know that the more lurid the story is, the more coverage it will get. The trope is later discussed and namechecked by news editor Gus Haynes when the case draws the attention away from the indictment of a prominent politician. | |
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Daredevil: During the '90s, The Kingpin momentarily set up his own news business when he found too many of New York's preexisting ones refusing to kowtow to him. As he runs it by a lieutenant: | |
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Darker Than You Think: According to Barbee, this is the philosophy by which Preston Troy runs the Clarendon Star. This makes him rather suspicious when his boss rejects a news story about Dr. Mondrick's mysterious death as "too sensational". | |
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In April Showers, the news media are all over the place in the immediate aftermath of the school shooting (they show up at an area where the injured are being treated and loaded onto ambulances moments after some of the students who just escaped the school do). One reporter asks his cameraman "Did you get it?" with a smile, referring to a wounded student lying on the ground surrounded by friends. | |
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Dirty Harry and his reporter girlfriend Samantha defy this trope in The Dead Pool when he's trying to talk down a suicidal man about to set himself on fire. They very nearly succeed when she turns off her camera and refuses to give him any of the publicity he craves, but then he does the deed anyway. Harry then tries to console her by reminding her she did the right thing: "Most reporters would have gone for the exclusive." | |
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No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: Thanks to this trope, the United Assassins Association has grown from a deadly underground curiosity to a world-wide bloodsport sensation that's aired on national television for the enjoyment of the masses. Santa Destroy is now filled with both high-ranked and aspiring assassins, all dreaming of making it big in the world of killing. | |
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In Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Pascual, one of the news redactors in the radio station where the protagonist works, has a natural liking to this kind of news, and when left alone he fills all the time slot with the most lurid tales he can find. It wouldn't be so bad if he worked in a more low brow station, but since he works in a "classy" one he is reprimanded for this habit very often. Usually, his coworkers temper it by reminding him that they have to include other types of news; but since they also leave the redaction office very often, leaving Pascual alone to his means, the problem only exacerbates. | |
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Subverted in Kick-Ass. A news network broadcasts what they believe will be a livestream of the titular hero announcing his identity and retirement, only for it to instead be his and Big Daddy's Televised Torture and (planned) Public Execution at the hands of Chris D'Amico's goons. Just as the goons get properly stuck in, the feed cuts out, with the justification that what's happening is too graphic for the network to show. Notably, one group of viewers is then shown frantically opening a laptop so they can view the livestream at its source. | |
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In Halloween II (2009), Dr. Loomis has become like this, writing a best-selling book about the killings from the first film while making a killing himself. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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Gone Girl is a deconstruction of this trope. Nick's life is destroyed when the media declares that he's responsible for his wife Amy's disappearance, even though he didn't do it. Amy was keenly exploiting this trope in order to ruin Nick's life. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e26a70e8 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e3349241 | comment |
Happens once in a while in Diabolik with bloody and gory events being picked up by the news with the explicit intention to get more viewers. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e3349241 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e3af3a3c | comment |
In We Become What We Behold, a short flash Deconstruction Game that satirises social media and clickbait, you play as a media mogul who takes pictures of a crowd walking around. It starts with taking pictures of people in hats and cute couples, but then this stuff stops being "newsworthy". So you take a picture of a squarehead with a mental illness yelling at a circlehead, then distrust being sown between the two groups, then outright hostility. And then things get really nasty. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e3af3a3c | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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Drop the Dead Donkey. Gus Hedges decides they should have a Crimewatch program, but their Crime Reconstruction of a robbery at a post office isn't dramatic enough, so Gus has a clerk being shotgunned to death in Slow Motion and an old lady getting her teeth knocked out, none of which actually happened. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_e9a8ee1b | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_ed551b4e | comment |
Final Girls revolves around three beautiful young woman, each of whom survived an in-universe massacre by different serial killers. The media promptly labeled each of them as Final Girls, treating them as though they survived real-life horror movies. All of the attention only serves to amplify their trauma and make their lives worse. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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One of the episodes of The Mentalist is titled "If It Bleeds, It Leads" and is about the death of a TV reporter. Naturally, her death is headline news on the station that she works for. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_efa49b17 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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The Brokenwood Mysteries: One episode sees the local Immoral Journalist Cushla snap photos of a bloody Jane Doe, which appear on the cover of the next day’s newspaper. She's called out for insensitivity, but doesn't care. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
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Diagnosis: Murder: In the episode Murder X 4 Steve tells killer Justin Blair, who is terminally ill, that his death by a SWAT sniper will be broadcast on live television by 8 news reporters, and manages to talk him down by pointing out this would be the worst way for him to say goodbye to his wife and kids. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_f43b3a51 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_f5799bd9 | comment |
The Critic: In "Dukarella", Alice's sister Miranda interviews for a job at the New York Post, and get told by the editor that every headline must contain the words "Nude", "Headless", "Sewage" and "Governor". | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_f5799bd9 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_f74b5f80 | comment |
Babylon 5: Forell uses a variation of this trope with Delenn. | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_f74b5f80 | |
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If It Bleeds, It Leads | |
| If It Bleeds, It Leads / int_fe724d7f | comment |
The music video for Rammstein's "Ich Will" satirizes this trope by having the band portray people literally robbing a bank for media attention rather than money, and the journalists assaulting them with questions as if they were politicians or celebrities. It works so well for them that the video starts and ends on them receiving a Golden Camera award for the robbery. | |
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