News Monopoly

In movies and TV, the primary method for showing that something has become the news item of the moment is to have somebody flick through the channels on TV and find that every single channel is covering the same story simultaneously. To make things more convenient, sometimes every time they switch channels they find a new aspect of the story being covered, so that this random succession of sound bites adds up to a fairly cohesive television article.

For example, Bob the jewel thief watches the news triumphantly:

Reporter: Russian Police are baffled after the mysterious disappearance of the Hungarian crown jewels.

Bob switches channels.

New reporter: The jewels, on loan to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, were supposedly protected by a five-million-ruble security system.

Bob switches again.

Yet another reporter: However, at nine o'clock this morning, museum curator Dmitri Chukraj was alarmed to discover that the entire display had somehow been replaced with some Reese's Pieces and a rubber chicken.

And so forth. It's sometimes parodied by having him turn to a channel that normally wouldn't have the news — a cartoon channel, or MTV — and yet it's still talking about it. Another common gag is to have the different reports literally Finishing Each Other's Sentences or answering each other's questions. Expect a news-phobic Apathetic Citizen to stop flipping immediately if they do manage to find anything else on.

Makes varying degrees of sense; when the story is about, say, a nuclear threat on the White House, you'd expect nothing less. But when it's something like a chimp loose on the freeway, it starts to get dubious. And even if it is important, flipping through channels never gives repeat information, even though it's highly unlikely that each broadcast started at the exact same time and covered all the points in the exact same order. Plus eventually you have to get to some shopping channel or college/school billboard or public access channel which would never break their format (or even have the ability) to report anything at all. Nevermind the fact that the various news channels are watching each other's broadcasts, and therefore information on breaking developments doesn't stay exclusive for long.

This trope has for all intents and purposes replaced the Spinning Paper montage, which in movies of the thirties, forties and fifties was used to this effect by having the story appear as the front page of every major newspaper.

See also Coincidental Broadcast, Worst News Judgment Ever, or Your Television Hates You for the non-news version. See Do Not Adjust Your Set if some interloper is replacing normal broadcasts with its message. The basic idea is Truth in Television.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Black Cat the Big Bad kills more or less every major world leader in one day. No one is talking about anything else, obviously.
• Darkly inverted in Chainsaw Man: Haruka and Asa are both left in disbelief that nothing plot-relevant is being reported on in the news, even just a week after hundreds of thousands of people turned into rampaging monsters, with more turning every day. Although the audience was told much earlier that the government tightly control the media to avoid causing fear, as that will make devils more powerful.
• The third part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has an interesting variant that combines this trope with Coincidental Broadcast. Joseph's stand gives him a clairvoyant ability when used in conjunction with certain objects: when he uses this on a television, the channel begins flipping rapidly, and the resultant melding of words from different speakers ends up spelling out a new message that gives the information he wants.
• Comically downplayed in Oshi no Ko: After Aqua publicizes that he and Ruby are Ai Hoshino's children, a list of five trending topics has four relevant ones. But dead in the middle is one for "Chainsaw-san".

Comic Books

• Kingdom Come: Superman watching multiple reports of the Kansas disaster, each on a different monitor, in the Fortress of Solitude.
• In Watchmen, Ozymandias sees the effect of a disaster by watching multiple news channels simultaneously and getting the message that has been sent.

Comic Strips

• In a FoxTrot comic from the mid-1990s, every channel is covering the O. J. Simpson trial, except for one that briefly diverts to mention a UFO landing on the White House lawn.
  • In the strip from the day of the 1992 election, Jason is watching TV and every channel is about to say who the winner of the election is. Jason panics and keeps flipping until he finds a channel showing an episode of Star Trek, and breathes a sigh of relief.

Films — Animated

• Cars has a montage covering Lightning McQueen's disappearance, including a tiny Kei car with huge anime-esque eyes jabbering in Japanese, and an appearance by Jay Limo.
• The Powerpuff Girls Movie: While walking home from school, the titular girls stop in front of an electronics store and see several TVs, each on a different channel but all covering similar stories about them destroying Townsville. Shortly after they walk away, every TV switches to the same emergency broadcast of Professor Utonium being thrown in jail.

Films — Live-Action

• Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles has this straight up. Mick is on the freeway when he spots a "cat" next to the road. He stops to pick it up, causing traffic to stop. Then people start speculating what is happening, until someone misunderstands and thinks its a bomb. The police and bomb squad show up, only to find Mick carrying a skunk towards them. When he gets home, he turns on the TV to find himself the news. Desperately trying to hide his guilt, he turns half a dozen TV channels, all covering this same story. Finally, he turns off the TV, exclaiming nothing good is on.
• I, Tonya: After Nancy Kerrigan is kneecapped, Tonya phones Jeff in order for him to watch television, as the news of Nancy's assault is on every channel. The discovery blindsides both of them, as according to their accounts in the film's interviews, the plan was to send anonymous death threats to Nancy, not physically attack her.
• Used for dramatic effect in Joker (2019): the screen pans away from a wall of monitors, all reporting on either the death of Murray Franklin on live TV by The Joker, or the riots occurring in the latter's name throughout Gotham.
• The Life and Death of Peter Sellers has this when he is suffering his infamous octuple heart attack in Los Angeles in 1964. Back in England, his mother is delighted to find out that he is sufficiently famous that there are reports on his condition on both the BBC and ITV at once.
• Network: After Howard is assassinated on-air, the camera pans out from a single monitor depicting the immediate aftermath of the event to a row of monitors featuring multiple news networks reporting on what just happened. One by one, they all turn off until the viewer is again left with the single frame of Howard's dead body.
• Also done in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Flynt, with multiple TVs, turns them all on to different channels, and when he finds out they're all focused on what's going on at his house, lets out a war whoop of joy.
• Run Hide Fight has a social media version when Tristan finds out that the school shooting he and his friends have been carrying out has become the number one trending topic on Twitter. Given that Tristan is an Attention Whore seeking Fame Through Infamy, he says "about time" when he sees this.
• Shaun of the Dead:
  • Sent up, and mildly subverted in that only every other channel is showing the news and covering the story, while the other channels conveniently fill in the blanks in the sentences with unrelated statements. Eg:
    Channel 4 News Anchor: Though no one official is prepared to comment, religious groups are calling it Judgement Day. There's...
    The Smiths: ...Panic on the streets of London...
    ITV News Anchor: ...as an increasing number of reports of...
    Football Commentator: ...serious attacks on...
    Channel Five News Anchor: ...people, who are literally being...
    Narrator of a Wildlife Documentary: ...eaten alive.
    Jeremy Thompson (Sky News): The witnesses' reports are sketchy, but one unifying detail seems to be that the attackers in many instances appear to be-
    Vernon Kaye (T4): ...dead excited to have with us here a sensational chart topping...
  • Played for Laughs when Shaun is at work selling a TV to some customers.
    Shaun: This one comes with the basics of a digital package. <starts flipping through channels> You've got your lifestyle channels there, a bit of Trisha, you've got entertainment, I don't like this, news, all the basic, uh, news... channels... <silently flips through multiple news reports>
  • A much creepier variation occurs later the characters turn on a TV to find out the news, and every single channel is only showing a Technical Difficulties card.
  • At the end of the film, the same sort of montage selects various programmes showing the uses tamed zombies are put to once the apocalypse wears off. The Sky News anchor is shown giving his horrified reaction to breaking the news and telling people what to do if attacked by zombies.
• The trope appears in Speed, when Howard Payne is watching several news channels at once, all covering the runaway bus. He muses, after detonating a secondary bomb and watching the reactions, "Interactive TV, Jack! The wave of the future, eh?"

Literature

• In the Godzilla (2014) novelization, just after the Hawaii battle between Godzilla and Hokmuto breaks out, this event naturally takes over just about every U.S. TV channel, breaking down the Masquerade which Monarch have spent decades enforcing.
• In Ben Elton's book Popcorn, a set of serial killers reveal to their hostages that their situation is on every channel on TV. Except for one channel showing The Simpsons, which is seamlessly dropped in.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted in Being Human: Cutler tries to do this to show the elder vampires how the world is scared about werewolves. Sadly for him, it's been covered up, leading to flipping through a variety of unrelated TV shows to his annoyance and frustration.
• Inverted in the British comedy Broken News, which is based on someone supposedly flipping between 24-hour news channels, all of which are showing different stories, and the amusement comes from the start of one story feeding into a different one as the channel is changed.
• Doctor Who: This happens frequently on the new series. During episodes where aliens or creatures attempt to invade Earth, fictional news broadcasts (usually BBC News) will be shown explaining the situation and worldwide reaction to the event.
  • "Aliens of London": The crashed spaceship is the hot topic on all news channels, and also Blue Peter (which is showing kids how to make a UFO-shaped cake).
  • "Army of Ghosts": The Doctor is shown at one point flipping through TV channels, which are all devoted in some way to the regular appearances of the ghosts — not just on the news, but on talk shows, T-shirts, and even EastEnders.
  • Subverted in "The Sound of Drums", where the Master flicks through various channels reporting on the upcoming First Contact, before finally settling down to watch Teletubbies.
  • "The Sontaran Stratagem" has a news montage about the noxious gas spewing from every ATMOS-outfitted car on Earth.
  • "The Power of Three" has one early on about the millions of mysterious black cubes that have appeared all around the planet.
• Played for laughs in Saturday Night Live, in a skit where Bill Clinton, in bed with Hillary, tries desperately to find a news channel that is not discussing his sex scandal. No hope for him though, as even the weather report manages to weasel it in.
• Used in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip where every news channel is covering the show's producer's outburst on live TV about the crappy state of today's television landscape. It actually uses this to mock the quick formation of memes as every single reporter independently latches onto an analogy to the famous "I'm mad as hell" scene from Network.

Video Games

• Played with in Command & Conquer: Generals's Expansion Zero Hour. It's intro is played in this style, however each and every single one of the reports in full is actually part of the plot, serving as Exposition for the game's storyline, with one reporter on each side.
• In Starcraft II, this is the method Matt Horner uses to bring Jim Raynor up to speed on the Zerg invasion. Of course, when you have an event like this where billions of people are being killed, it ought to be on every station. The flipping itself is justified in at least one case, where a sudden explosion kills the news crew and cuts off the signal.

Web Original

• This brilliant promo for a Bob Dylan compilation lets you flip through 16 channels at your leisure, from news to reality TV to fake movies, and on every show the performers are simultaneously miming along to "Like A Rolling Stone".
• A Liberal Twitter meme in the late 10's was to list all the cable news stations focusing on some Trump admin scandal, followed by FOX News reporting on something minor to allegedly distract from it. Joke channel also focusing on scandal optional.

Western Animation

• Happens in a few DuckTales (1987) episodes:
  • In "A Case of Mistaken Secret Identity", several talk shows are seen speculating on Gizmoduck's true identity.
  • In "The Masked Mallard", several networks are covering the Masked Mallard's having turned to crime.
• Garfield and Friends: In Video Airlines, Jon was trying to watch TV, and every single channel was showing the movie Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2.
• Here Comes Garfield has a bored Garfield tries to watch TV, but finds the exact same car commercial on every channel.
  Man: You know, Pleasure Motors—(click) You know, Pleasure Motors is conveniently located right here in Downtown—(click) Of course, if you can't make it to our Downtown location, we have new locations under construction in Midtown—(click) Uptown—(click) And in the loop. (click) To Pleasure Motors, your business is our pleasure—(click) Where our pleasure is your business—(click) And our pleasure is none of your business!
  • The scene was also adapted for a CBS promo promoting the special:
    Man: Coming up Monday! (click) Right after It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, with all your f—(click) Don't miss the all-new, hilarious, outrageous Here Comes Garfield. Here Comes Garf—(click) Garfield! (click) Garfield! It's that funn—(click) It's that funny cat from the funny pages! (click) Monday at 8:30—(click) 7:30, central and mountain!
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Daylight Savings", the Professor sets a 7:30 curfew for the girls, allowing Townsville's villains to rampage through the city with the girls unable to stop them. The reluctant Professor tries to get his mind off of it by watching TV, but every channel is reporting on the destruction until he finally finds solace on The Time Channel...where he finds out that he forgot to set the clocks back for Daylight Savings. After finally getting the girls out of bed and sending them out to save the day, he goes through the channels again, now reporting on how things are getting back to normal.
• The Simpsons:
  • Sent up in "Radioactive Man", where the channel breaks occur every syllable:
    "Ev"-"er"-"y"-"one"-"is"-"tal"-"king"-"a"-"bout"-"Ra"-"di"-"o"-"act"-"ive"-"man"-"y'all."
  • Used also in "Homer Badman" where, inexplicably, Homer allegedly touching a babysitter's butt is national news on every channel and Movie Of The Week fodder. You know things are bad when even Channel Ocho is having a field day at your expense.
• Walt Disney Presents: The animated special Duck Flies Coop has Donald Duck quitting his job and leaving for parts unknown. To mess with Donald, Walt Disney orders his studio's publicity department to go all-out in spreading the news, which is followed by a sequence of Donald listening to reports about his departure on his car radio.
• A version of this was seen on The Weekenders, where Tish, angry that her friends have started using her name as a slang word, flips through the channels and discovers that every channel has some reference to "Tishing". (An advertiser is heard to say "It's Tishtastic!")

Real Life

• Events such as the 1991 Gulf War, the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the transit bombings in London, England on July 7th, 2005, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Paris attacks of November 13th 2015, or the OJ Simpson trial - just try finding a channel that isn't covering it, and for hours on end at that.
  • The July 7th bomb attacks on the London Underground (and one bus) provided an especially evocative example: Matrix signs over the motorways heading into the city simply stated, "PULL OVER. TURN ON RADIO".
    • In fact, the afternoon after the 9/11 attacks, parents were warned not to let their children watch TV because of how widespread the coverage was. To be fair, this was back when The WB and a handful of independent stations still ran children's programming blocks on weekdays (and of course, much of PBS's normal daytime programming is comprised of educational, children's programming of the likes of Sesame Street and Barney & Friends - as described under No-Hoper Repeat, most of PBS' affiliates switched to 24/7 kids' shows for the week after the attacks).
  • The same goes for a Presidential address (shown live) in the US.
  • Also watch in your own city in the event of severe weather. You'll notice every local station with a newscast in your city broadcasting continuous information about the ongoing tornado, hurricane, etc...
    • In a few rare cases, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, it can be a national story as well.
  • Also played straight after the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013: all of Boston's major network affiliates preempted a large amount of programming to provide local coverage of the aftermath. It went even further during the manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, when the networks offered national coverage throughout the day, including the final moments of the manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (which conveniently took place in primetime).
    • It also had side effects in Canada, as several television providers (particularly Bell) source their U.S. east coast network feeds from Boston (some providers alternatively use Buffalo, Detroit, and/or Rochester instead)—but rights to 75% of U.S. network shows are also held by Canadian networks, and they will typically play along with U.S. preemptions to ensure they can get the valuable "simsubs" that keep them afloat.
  • NBCUniversal and Viacom-owned networks ran some coverage related to the "March For Our Lives" protests in 2018, which became quite polarizing.
• There are plenty of less-than-important stories that get wall-to-wall coverage as well. In fact, less-than-important stories seem to get more wall-to-wall coverage than important ones.
  • This came with the rise of round-the-clock news coverage. They have hours of news to fill, so they tend to repeat themselves quite a bit. Shows with sensationalist leanings, such as Nancy Grace, are even worse; that woman can get a solid six month's worth of shows out of one news event.
• Supposedly, the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal literally took up about 1.5 times as much screen time as every other news story combined when it was the big story.
• The death of Michael Jackson became a "too true" example of a single story dominating several stations at once, and far beyond the expected 24-Hour News Networks. The night of his death, NBC, ABC, and CBS scrapped most of their prime time schedules for tribute shows/news coverage. (Fox stuck with a So You Think You Can Dance live show, but there was a tribute to him at the top of the program. A few days later, Fox aired a rerun of an American Idol episode from the past season that was themed around Michael Jackson songs.) Music video channels, even Network Decay victims like MTV, flooded the airwaves with loops of his videos. All in all, the coverage of his death, memorial service, etc. took up almost a month of round the clock coverage, even ignoring major global events like the revolts in Iran and a coup in Latin America.
  • The deaths of Princess Diana and Robin Williams also come to mind.
• At least in the United States, there will always be some channels which probably wouldn't change their programming even at The End of the World as We Know It. The Cartoon Network is going to show their cartoons, the Food Channel is going to be baking a cake, and Sesame Street is going to sing a song about sharing. That said, if something really serious goes down, the Emergency Alert System would take over all the TVs. That said, 9/11 proved a rare exception; the coverage was so widespread in fact, that a lot of the kids' networks such as CN deliberately didn't change their schedules so kids would have something safe to watch. Meanwhile, the Food Network broadcast a memorial graphic and nothing else. The attacks didn't alter the Street, but a storyline was aired about a fire at Hooper's Store about a year afterward. (Arthur had a similar storyline.) A lot of networks (especially networks that broadcast nothing but pre-recorded shows) were operated completely automatically back then. The only person on site might have been a lone security guard. It never occurred to the owners that there could be a national emergency serious enough to affect broadcasting but not serious enough for broadcasting not to matter. Nowadays most networks have at least one operator on duty in Master Control whenever they're on air for this exact reason.
  • Speaking of emergency broadcasting, while a national emergency such as 9/11 was the kind of event — short of a nuclear war — that the Emergency Alert/Broadcast System was created for, the EAS administrators decided not to issue an Emergency Action Alert (which would have compelled all broadcasters to transmit important news and information on the emergency at the demand of the government) because they quickly realized they would be redundant and counter-productive — the broadcast networks and nearly every TV station of any type (as mentioned above, barring some kids' channels) had all already shifted to a round-the clock coverage of the attacks, and the EAS system could only carry audio simulcast from a radio station (thus, making it easier for the President to speak directly to the media instead)
• Anything to do with The Pope is serious business due to his international prominence as leader of the Catholic faith. If anything significant happens to the Pope—especially if they step down (Pope Benedict XVI) or die (Pope John Paul II), every channel will cover the reaction and (if necessary) the funeral. Then the news channels begin to hype up the conclave by profiling every papal candidate, putting up a picture-in-picture camera of the smoke stack on the Sistine Chapel, and debating what color the smoke is. When the decision is made, every network promptly drops everything again.
• Elections in the U.S. are always going to dominate the news cycle in every leap year^note Primarily the presidential election, but since 2010, the midterms have gotten a lot of attention as well. Even when there are other big stories in the news cycle, the election is almost always front and center. Only mass shootings, deadly terrorist attacks, major natural disasters, or pandemics will take precedence over election coverage. When that happens, coverage will inevitably focus on how the candidates react to the event, as it can influence their policy positions and public reception.

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