The Daily Misinformer

"Baldur's Mouth is truly remarkable. I had thought the purpose of a broadsheet was to inform the people, but I see now that I was mistaken."

— Minthara, Baldur's Gate III

Extra! Extra! Read All About It! Obviously Evil MegaCorp cleared of wrongdoing! The Hero arrested for slander, Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking, and everything else he accused the MegaCorp of! See more in our evening edition!

If you're reading these kinds of headlines, you may have subscribed to the Daily Misinformer. The Daily Misinformer is a specific type of periodical or website whose purpose in a narrative is spreading misinformation in an attempt to make life harder for our protagonists. This can be accomplished in a variety of manners, ranging from turning public opinion against the heroes, to unquestioningly regurgitating The Empire's propaganda, or just printing Blatant Lies and libel that a reporter pulled from where the sun don't shine. At best, they'll print the occasional Cassandra Truth but present it in such a way that ruins the credibility.

The Daily Misinformer is so disreputable, in fact, that it will often get acknowledged In-Universe by the characters that read it for how inaccurate the reporting is. It's not uncommon for people to call these publications "rags", an antiquated reference to the fact that sensationalized publications used to be printed on lower-quality paper that often disintegrated if handled too often.

Compare with Lurid Tales of Doom if the stories reported are especially outlandish. Can overlap with Strawman News Media if the work is actively attempting satire. If it's a print publication, this can be used to demonstrate that Old Media Are Evil; a website can demonstrate the opposite and be a Shallow News Site Satire to boot. Expect these publications to employ at least one Immoral Journalist, often exhibit the Worst News Judgement Ever, report on Trashy True Crime, and have plenty of Tabloid Melodrama crossing its front page. Sometimes, this kind of "news" outlet will employ those skilled journalists of rubbish/garbage from the Writers Suck sack, and might actually make many characters question Who Writes This Crap?! An evening news version of this is more akin to Kent Brockman News.

As intentional misinformation is all-too-common in Real Life news publications, No Real Life Examples, Please!.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Mission: Yozakura Family, Spy Day is the spy world's most popular tabloid. While it has a vast network of connections privy to the deepest, darkest secrets of the highest profile spies, it's just as prone to publishing libelous articles to sell papers when it can get away with it. Alexandryu, the magazine's editor-in-chief, regularly threatens his detractors with "social annihilation" to blackmail them into doing what he wants.
• One Piece features the World Economic Journal, a newspaper that has subscribers across the world. Not only is its editor-in-chief a major player in the criminal underworld, said editor, "Big News" Morgans, is trying to screw over both the World Government and pirates by reporting falsehoods and half-truths that psychologically screw with pirate-kind, while simultaneously refusing to conform to World Government censorship.

Comic Books

• Marvel Universe: Zig-Zagged with The Daily Bugle. Under his tenure as Editor-in-Chief, J. Jonah Jameson generally prides himself on journalistic integrity and reporting the facts. However, he has a blind spot when it comes to superheroes, whom he views as vigilantes and constantly publishes negative stories about.
  • Jameson consistently paints Spider-Man as a vigilante menace operating outside of the law, making him kind of the web-slinger's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis. More than one story sees him issuing a retraction in Spidey's favor once the real culprits come out, but he's always been reluctant to do so. Since 2017, however, he's known about Spider-Man's secret identity and has cut back on the slander, with The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) having him hail Spidey as a hero.
  • Jameson doesn't like most other Marvel heroes much better, though ever since Jessica Jones saved his daughter's life in Alias he's had a fairly good relationship with her (to the point where Jessica's main Love Interest Luke Cage once grumbles that she's the only super whom Jameson ever says anything nice about), and hires her in The Pulse as an expert consultant for a new, more neutral superhero-focused publication of the same title. It also comes out in the first Pulse Story Arc that he and Benjamin Urich once tried to expose Norman Osborn as the Green Goblin but were sued for libel and forced to retract the whole thing. After Spidey and Luke go after Osborn in retaliation for attacking the pregnant Jessica and force him to transform in front of dozens of witnesses in broad daylight, Jameson promptly orders Urich's expose reprinted.
• Superman:
  • The Elseworld Superman: True Brit, in which Kal-El's rocket lands in England, features Superman's civilian identity working for the Daily Smear, a magazine whose editors have no compunction against printing libel, lies or even slandering Superman.
  • Regular continuity has The National Whisper. When they run a story that Superman may have helped Lex Luthor fake his death, Clark is annoyed enough to confront the editor in costume. The editor claims they never said he did, just quoted an expert as saying he could have. "A crackpot maybe, but still an expert!" Superman asks if they have any journalistic integrity and says "To think trees died for this imitation newspaper!"

Comic Strips

• Beetle Bailey: Rocky runs "The Muckraker" newspaper at Camp Swampy. Since Rocky is a mere private, he isn't privy to the meetings of officers, ranked lieutenant and higher. This doesn't stop him from printing speculation, guesswork, unfounded rumors and thin-air "facts."
• Bloom County: The Bloom Beacon/Picayune^note  It's been called both with no regard to consistency due to the strip's Negative Continuity is reliably portrayed as a sensationalist rag which when it's not front-paging outright lies and fabrications is twisting the truth so much there's barely a distinction to be made. Milo Bloom, the paper's resident ten-year-old news hound, frequently twists the statements of people he interviews (Once he managed to finagle a senator into "confessing" that he sunk Jimmy Hoffa and lost the body), and Opus briefly took up the position of the paper's ombudsman and had to deal with a steady stream of complaints and abuse.

Fan Works

• In Ladybug Out (and similar Miraculous Ladybug fanfics), the Ladyblog turns from a somewhat reliable news source about Ladybug and Cat Noir (even if Ayla Césaire is not what we would call conscious about her own safety to get the scoop) to a bunch of slanders and lies, mostly because Ayla takes Lila Rossi (a Consummate Liar who wants to destroy Ladybug at any cost) as a trusted source of information and then she doubles down on the sleaze when anybody, including Ladybug, tries to advise her about Lila's unreliability. In this particular story, Alya deliberately edits a video of Ladybug and Cat Kissing Under the Influence because she ships them and it eventually leads to Marinette creating her own blog just so there will be someone giving reliable news about her activities as Ladybug.
• Superwomen of Eva: One of the recurring elements throughout the stories is "The Tokyo Tattler", an Expy of the Daily Bugle that reports on the weird occurrences on Tokyo-3 and the acts of the titular superheroines (including giving them their names). It's mentioned repeatedly to be a supermarket tabloid-level rag willing to sling any sleaze to keep afloat and just lucked into not being important enough for NERV's press division (or Section 2) to slap a gag on it.

Film — Live-Action

• Jaws has tragic consequences after the Amity Gazette, presumably under a directive from the mayor, inaccurately reports that the tiger shark caught about halfway into the film is the same shark responsible for the deaths around Amity Island.
• Men in Black inverts this for a joke; Agent K calls tabloids that report on alien activity and Elvis Lives stories "the best investigative reporting on the planet", and indeed, it's how he and J find out about the Bug landing on Earth.
  J: I can't believe you're looking for tips in the supermarket tabloids!
  K: Not 'looking for'. Found.
  [K sets down Weekly World News issue with the headline "Space Aliens Stole My Husband's Skin!"]
• The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies is Elliot Carver, international media mogul who uses his large media conglomerate to manipulate global events, and is trying to start a War for Fun and Profit between the UK and China.

Literature

• Harry Potter:
  • The Daily Prophet knowingly published libelous articles by Rita Skeeter, but truly becomes this trope by Order of the Phoenix: In accordance to the Ministry's policy of denying anything is wrong, it spends the first year of the return of Voldemort defaming Potter and Dumbledore to the point the wizarding public becomes more susceptible to manipulation by Death-Eaters.
  • The Quibbler of Xenophilius Lovegood publishes stories about conspiracies (one even accuses Cornelius Fudge of cooking goblins!) and cryptozoology. However, it becomes an inversion in Order of the Phoenix, after it publishes an exclusive interview with Harry that starts to repair his reputation among the student body.
• Several of Stephen King's books and short stories feature Inside View, a National Enquirer-esque tabloid filled with lurid stories of supernatural phenomena. The magazine mostly publishes hoaxes, though both The Dead Zone and The Night Flier have them stumble onto real paranormal incidents.
• The Truth: One of the Truth's rivals is a tabloid (The Ankh-Morpork Inquirer) with zero journalistic integrity printing ludicrous events like women in Lancre giving birth to snakes. They turn out to be written by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler (not out of malicious intent, the Engravers' Guild hired him to put the Truth out of business), who stops doing it after a thorough tongue-lashing from Sacharissa.
• The Two Georges paints the newspaper "Common Sense" as this; in the Alternate History presented in the narrative, America Is Still a Colony, and Common Sense's calls to break off from Britain are seen as radical. The paper is speculated to be the public face of the anti-British Sons of Liberty group.

Live-Action TV

• CSI: NY: A Season 5 arc features a sleazy media mogul named Robert Dunbrook who owns more than 20 publications. One of his newspapers is The Ledger which runs stories on every perceived scandal the owner can come up with... everything from corrupt politicians to UN-proven sexual harassment by various city leaders. In "The Party's Over," the paper sensationalizes the "Blue Flu" when most of the NYPD goes on strike due to not being paid when the fund their salaries come from dries up. Dunbrook then turns around and donates twenty million dollars to the city to make himself look good. At one point, Mac confronts Dunbrook during a photo shoot. A young woman being photographed for the cover of The Ledger is wearing only a low-cut top with an NYPD logo on it, an NYPD cap, and a thong while eating a donut. Dunbrook is handed a printed shot of this with the heading "New York's Finest" which he approves while speaking to Mac, who's looking on in disgust. There is a momentary zigzag in the season finale, though, when The Ledger's cover story is a memorial for an NYPD officer who was killed in the line of duty.
• Hannibal features TattleCrime, an adaptation of the National Tattler from Red Dragon. Freddie Lounds, a blogger for the site, is a thorn in the BAU's side for most of the series, but is spared the fate of her novel counterpart; instead, Frederick Chilton is kidnapped and set ablaze by Dolarhyde following Lounds's article on him being published.
• In The Incredible Hulk (1977)
  • Intrepid Reporter Jack McGee writes for the National Register, a publication not shy at all about running stories on a 7-ft tall green monster terrorizing people and destroying property all over the country.
  • The paper also makes up fake news. In "Stop the Presses," Register employees are sent to Bruno's Diner (Banner's workplace-of-the-week) after hours with loads of rancid meat and rotting produce, which they spread all over the counters and photograph for an ongoing "expose" on local mom & pop eateries. Only David discovering that one published picture had captured both a clock on the wall and a copy of that day's Register proves that everything was faked. Meanwhile, McGee is covering a psychic convention in the same city. This, of course, leads to him trying to capture the Hulk for living proof of "the Creature" he's been reporting on for a couple of years now.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017) brings us The Daily Punctilio. It appears more often in the show than in the original novels, on account of the fact that editor-in-chief Eleanora Poe has been changed from Mr. Poe's sister to his wife. Like in the books, it's an awful paper, unable to even get the name of the Big Bad right, calling him "Count Omar" as opposed to "Count Olaf". Eleanora actually receives some Adaptational Karma in the series because of the state of the Punctilio; the final episode shows the paper as having gone out of print due to the sheer amount of false reports made by the paper, and Eleanora is behind bars.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded "Midnight Star" in 1984, a parody song about the fact-free journalism in supermarket tabloids. Here's a snippet of this "reporting:"
  And top psychics all agree / That the telephone company
  Will have a brand-new service that lets you talk to the dead

Video Games

• Baldurs Gate 3 has The Baldur's Mouth, which frequently reports on recent events, NPCs can be overheard complaining about it having extremely biased puff pieces for Gortash and the Steel Watch, suppression of critique on how the lords of Baldur's Gate are handling the refugee crisis and discontinuing the crossword puzzles, and there's a quest involving trying to keep it from running an article that will trash the party's reputation if left unchecked. It's all but stated that it used to be a much more reputable paper until Gortash essentially bribed the editor with a full on automated printing press.
• Deus Ex features a variety of in-game periodicals with different takes on plot-relevant events... and then you have the Midnight Sun, a tabloid that ran a story about the Gray Death pandemic being extraterrestrial, among other such ludicrous claims. Most of the stories you see in the Midnight Sun are written by Joe Greene, a spy for Majestic 12, in order to help throw the scent off of MJ-12's actual machinations.
• In Dishonored 2, the Dunwall Courier attempted to link Empress Emily Kaldwin and her father, Corvo Attano, to the Crown Killer, as several of Emily's political opponents have been slain by the Crown Killer shortly before the game begins. Newspapers in Karnaca fill this role for the majority of the game, expounding on propaganda about Delilah and claiming that any major targets killed by the player character were done in by the Crown Killer.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, the Endwalker Hildibrand quests introduces The Thavnairian Truth, a tabloid run by a Conspiracy Theorist named Delion who constantly believes that the world is under threat of Alien Invasion. He regularly publishes his "evidence" of people and governments being puppeted by outside forces or of world-ending threats from beyond the stars. Oddly enough, he usually ends up being Right for the Wrong Reasons, but his Confirmation Bias constantly prevents him from seeing the truth laid before his eyes by the Warrior of Light.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has Occulture, a Conspiracy Theorist magazine that primarily discusses the Paradox Pokemon. While the Pokemon they discuss are real, they tend to make completely baseless claims about their origins in the Pokedex, such as claiming that Iron Thorns and Scream Tail are from a billion years into the future and past respectively and, most infamously, claims that Iron Jugulus is the offspring between a Hydriegon and a robot.
• In Spider-Man (PS4) J. Jonah Jameson now runs a podcast called "Just the Facts with J. Jonah Jameson"; after basically every story mission in the game, and a few side missions, you'll get Jameson's take on Spider-Man's actions, which usually paint him in a negative light. However, after the Devil's Breath virus becomes an epidemic and Silver Sable starts enacting martial law in New York, he pivots to both blaming Spider-Man and demanding Mayor Osborn try to curtail the violence enacted on innocent New Yorkers by what is essentially a private army.

Webcomics

• Paradox Space: Derse's newspaper "The Enquiring Carapacian" is described in-story as a "sleazy rag" and prominently featured in the Deadline Day short story.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal features one of these as a gag on how inaccurate science reporting is, with the scientist growing increasingly frustrated.

Western Animation

• An episode of Gravedale High has Max assign Duzer to work on the school newspaper. She quickly turns it into a tabloid called the Grave Intruder which reports a number of false stories such as Max having a secret crush on Headmistress Crone, Coach Cadaver having a human brain, and Chef Sal cleaning up his kitchen. Chaos ensues until the staff threatens to publish a story claiming that Duzer is in a relationship with Frankentyke.
• In the Martha Speaks episode "It's the Giant Pumpkin, Martha", T.D. reads a newspaper with Wacky News, which is full of made-up stories, like one about a hundred-year-old woman giving birth.
• In the Hey Arnold! episode, "The Big Scoop", Arnold and Gerald write for the school newspaper, but Helga starts a rival one and posts nothing but false stories like "Aronold falls in love with a tree", complete with cut and spliced photos of said articles that readers somehow don't notice.
• My Adventures with Superman:
  • Flamebird is a subversion. Introduced as Jimmy's nerdy conspiracy theory channel, it has few followers and is regularly debunked by Steve Lombard, a senior reporter at the Daily Planet. But as "My Adventures with Mad Science" shows, most of Jimmy's crazy theories wind up being correct or at least have serious basis in reality, such as the existence of Cadmus or hyper-intelligent gorillas.
  • While trying to deduce Superman's identity, Lois resorts to digging through decades of old, sleazy tabloids after mainstream press channels fail to provide any useful information. She clearly looks down upon said sources and is even more annoyed by Jimmy's excitement over them. A number of old articles detailing the existence of an "angel" in the midwest and the "flying boy of Kansas" prove to Lois that Superman is in fact Clark Kent.
• The Simpsons: Zig-Zagged in "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes". Homer starts a blog under the name "Mr. X" and begins posting whatever rumors he hears, and wins a Pulitzer completely by accident when he uncovers a series of corruption scandals. Unfortunately, this causes him to be shunned by the townsfolk who don't want their dirty laundry aired on the Internet, so he starts making stories up altogether to drive clicks, then gets kidnapped when a vaccine conspiracy theory he makes up turns out to be true.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: "The Krabby Kronicle" is about Mr. Krabs trying to make newspapers. When nobody buys them, he has SpongeBob act as a journalist to look around town for stories. When that fails as well, he tells SpongeBob to lie about the happenings just to make a quick buck. For instance, when a police officer is in front of Mrs. Puff, SpongeBob says that she got pulled over, which, in turn, shuts down her Boating School. Another example is when someone punches Larry to see how tough he is, only for SpongeBob to say that he is a weakling. SpongeBob sees the negative effects that these stories are having on people and tells Mr. Krabs to stop. Of course, Mr. Krabs doesn't, as the newspaper is selling. Eventually SpongeBob has enough, he and prints a story telling the truth, and how poorly Mr. Krabs is treating him. After this, the townsfolk rightfully beat up Mr. Krabs as they took all of their money back.

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