Basic Trope: A journalist doesn't care about the truth or about whether running a story will hurt people.
- Straight:
- Reporter Alice harasses Bob for an interview after his son Charlie is murdered, aggravating his grief until he has a mental breakdown.
- Alice has a peculiar habit of swindling fellow reporters into doing all the footwork in an investigative project, then swooping in and Stealing the Credit.
- Exaggerated:
- Reporter Alice badgers Bob for an interview mere minutes after his son Charlie is murdered, while Bob is holding his son's corpse. This drives Bob to take his own life then and there, and she airs the footage with glee because she thinks it'll advance her career.
- Charlotte, an up-and-coming actress, was locked out of her home naked. Alice brings a crowd of cameramen to interview her and spreads uncensored photos and videos over the Internet.
- Alice writes a hit piece on Bob's fault in Charlie's death (which is completely unjustified, it was a drunk driver) tossing theories for anything from Parental Neglect up to being an incestual necrophiliac pedophile, then sits back and wait for the court of public opinion to kill Bob (in more ways than one), which she will then write a tell-all book about that she hopes will net her a few million, if not the Pulitzer.
- Alice is the one who killed Charlie because it was a slow news day.
- The reason why said fellow reporters have not caught wise on Alice's stealing so far is because Alice has assassinated the people she steals credit from.
- Downplayed:
- Reporter Alice exaggerates some stories, but never goes so far as to outright lie about facts.
- Reporter Alice is too lazy to fact-check trivial stories like "Poppy the popstar buys another cat", but does put a lot of effort into the important ones.
- Justified:
- The society in this story is shown to reward sensationalist news more than honest news, incentivizing reporters like Alice to throw decency to the wind.
- Alice is a freelance journalist struggling to pay the bills and decides that journalistic ethics take a back seat to being able to afford rent.
- Alice is Bob's Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up and is willing to exploit her job's resources to continue making his life hell.
- Bob, unfortunately, is an acceptable target for the populace for some reason (bigotry, he's a politician, he accidentally kicked a dog, whatever) so it's not merely easy for Alice to manufacture sleaze, it would be against the norm for her not to do it.
- Reporter Alice is Faux Affably Evil. Beneath her journalistic professionalism lies a sadistic bitch.
- Bob was a Jerkass to Alice in the past and she holds a grudge.
- Inverted:
- Reporter Alice holds herself to an extreme standard of journalistic integrity, effectively being The Paragon in her newsroom.
- Reporter Alice is the only good character in a world of what is otherwise Black-and-Gray Morality.
- Subverted: Reporter Alice investigates Charlie's murder and settles on Dave as the main suspect. She is disgraced after it turns out that her evidence is insufficient to convict him, and people come to view her investigation as little more than an excuse to go after someone she disliked. Later it transpires that Dave was guilty after all.
- Double Subverted: Even though she was right about Dave being guilty, Alice violated journalistic ethics numerous times during the investigation, and her finding the right suspect was mostly due to luck.
- Parodied: The news channel Alice reports for is called Local Informative Endeavors Station, or "LIES".
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice sometimes violates journalistic integrity, but she has good intentions.
- Alice churns out a lot of poorly-researched, clickbaity, sensationalist garbage. It serves to finance the quality reporting she actually wants to do, but can't do full-time because it doesn't pay enough. Some characters think this justifies writing all the sleazy garbage, while others argue that she's still kind of a scumbag.
- It's clear that Alice is working for the villains, spreading bad press about their enemies and victims, but just how willing she is is not clear.
- Averted: Journalists in the story are shown to be neutral at worst and essential to the public at best.
- Enforced:
- The author lives in a country whose government hates journalists and demands that any fictional portrayal of them be negative.
- The executives believe journalists are important to society, and want to encourage them to take their role seriously with a cautionary tale about what'll happen if they don't.
- Alice is an explicit Take That! at some reporter the author hates, probably because the only difference between Alice and the real reporter is that Alice stoops to a "hands-on" approach at creating her sleaze.
- Lampshaded: "Oh, Alice, how nice of you to tell the whole world which shin hurts me most for them to kick while they meet me on the street!"
- Invoked: Alice lives in a dictatorship that forces her to write stories that glorify the government.
- Exploited: A local gang notices that Alice doesn't care about journalistic ethics, so they pay her to write an article that glorifies them and downplays their crimes.
- Defied:
- The head of the news station fires reporter Alice for her lack of journalistic integrity.
- After being ordered to run a false story, reporter Alice refuses and resigns in protest. She then goes on to get the true story out there and expose her old boss' corruption.
- The local government has some pointedly brutal anti-"fake news" rules and Alice decides making her career advance faster isn't worth risking being tossed into Room 101.
- Discussed: "Well, it wouldn't be a complete criticism of how much [evil politician du jour] has turned the world into a hellhole unless we add Alice, his pet snake of a journalist, fanning the flames of hatred."
- Conversed: "Gee, I wonder if the author hates journalists..."
- Implied: Someone reminds Alex that his daughter Alice is a journalist. His response is "Don't remind me!"
- Deconstructed:
- Because of the bad practices of Alice and her colleagues, trust in the media deteriorates to the point of nonexistence. As a result, nobody believes her when she reports on a real story.
- Due to her constant pestering, coupled with the fact that, you know, his son died, Bob inevitably lays her the fuck out and breaks expensive equipment in the process, getting her in trouble with her boss, or if she's a paparazza, putting her out of business. Bob also gets in trouble for aggravated assault.
- Reconstructed: Alice manages to twist around the situation to paint her as a brave stalwart of the Freedom of the Press who got Disproportionate Retribution at the hands of Bob — but rage not against Bob, beloved viewers, because who of you who have families of your own wouldn't be blind with grief if it happened to you?
- Played for Laughs: Alice's "reporting" is just a bunch of Blatant Lies that contradict each other.
- Played for Drama:
- The work focuses on how badly Alice's harassment affects her victims.
- Alice wants to be a good reporter, but insensitive sensationalism is what sells, and she needs to pay the bills...
- Alice is essentially the propaganda wing of whatever political identity the author hates, using slander, Manipulative Editing, hatemongering op-eds and all other manner of low-blow tactics to foster division and push a race war ever-closer. Any attempt to stop her is met with a shrug and a cheerful "Freedom of the Press!"
- Played for Horror: Reporter Alice orchestrates brutal murders just so she can write about them. After all, If It Bleeds, It Leads.
Go back to the main page, but for the love of every being ever worshipped, don't talk to the Immoral Journalist.
