Redshirt Reporter

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Who is out in 70 mile per hour winds, lashing rains and certain death? It's the Redshirt Reporter. When people need to know about how to get out of a flaming building, who is running through the building? The Redshirt Reporter. They are often seen wearing a rain slicker, amid flying debris, Going for the Big Scoop. Often ends up on Deadline News.

The Redshirt Reporter is the man (or woman — a Redshirt Reporter is about as likely to be a woman as a man) who is doing the stand-up, on-the-scene live report from someplace that's so insanely dangerous or unpleasant that anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't be there. However, the Hot Scoop is unlikely to be this on account of Big Damn Heroes.

If it's played for comedy, it may be that his boss hates him and is trying to get him killed, or it may be that the reporter is too dumb to realize the danger. In these cases, he usually survives. Played for drama, the reporter is "the best reporter we've got!", and is usually aware of how dangerous it is. This type is also much more likely to end up dead in fiction. A truly legendary reporter is even more likely to get bumped off, for various reasons. It's a trope that was lifted straight from real-life; long before there was television news, reporters were going into (or staying in) dangerous situations in order to get the story.

Related to Deadline News. If it's the "boss is trying to get him killed" version, it overlaps with The Uriah Gambit.

The trope name borrows from the original (1960s) Star Trek, where a newly introduced character (who usually got killed in the opening of that episode), was usually wearing a Red Shirt.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 
  • Dragon Ball: The reporters investigating the mysterious disappearance of Ginger Town's inhabitants ; they get to suffer the same fate, i.e. being sucked out and absorbed by Cell.
    • Though later on subverted by the reporters covering the Cell Games, as they somehow manage to survive (And fully believe Mr. Satan saved them).
      • Only in the Japanese Dub. In the english dub they talk with Goku after the time-skip and mention that it was stupid that Hercule got the credit.
  • A one-off reporter in Death Note - right after the Second Kira just killed a lot of reporters who disagreed with Kira - deliberately imperils his own life, John Hancock-style.
  • A major event in a flashback in Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger, when news reporter Lydia the Giraffe , also known as the AI of the Eto Rangers' ship, Kirinda, is Big Bad Nyanma's first victim, five years before the start of the series.

    Comic Book 
  • In The Pitt, two reporters fly towards the remains of Pittsburgh intending on reporting about it. Not wanting this to get out into the public, the Army helicopter is ordered to kill them, blowing up their helicopter.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Starship Troopers opens with a reporter in the middle of a battle. He is Killed In Action a moment later.
  • Volcano has this in one part, with a news reporter standing right up against the line of barriers that are barely containing the volcanic lava.
  • The Day After Tomorrow features a reporter giving up-to-the-minute reports on the tornados rampaging through downtown Los Angeles. He ends up flattened by flying debris, of course. Ironically, something similar happened to Anderson Cooper during Hurricane Ike in 2004 when he nearly got decapitated by a billboard.
  • In Cloverfield, one female reporter was seen on a television screen reporting near the monster. What happened to her was...not explicitly revealed.
  • In the 1998 American Godzilla movie, there are around three or four unnamed or unimportant reporters who buzz around Godzilla during his rampage. On the other hand, this is averted with the minor role of the camera guy - Victor "Animal" Palotti - who works with the main female character... He runs through the giant lizard's legs in front of it to get a good shooting angle, and Godzilla seems to flatten him... Then we find out that Animal stood right in the empty spot between Godzilla's toes. He couldn't believe his luck himself, either.
  • In Battle: Los Angeles, the reporters on the beach who are covering the "meteor shower" are among the first to be gunned down when the aliens emerge from the surf.
  • The conspiracy nut radio show host in 2012 is reporting live from Yellowstone as the supervolcano goes ker-blooie.
  • In Predator 2, a female reporter is near the shoot-out war zone between the police and Colombian drug dealers.
    Reporter: (some bullets shot near her) Oh, fuck this, I'm outta here!
  • In Three Kings, some Iraqi soldiers forced a female journalist to leave, at gunpoint.
  • The female report in Vantage Point who's getting killed by the bomb in the podium exploding.
  • Thrill Seekers: Tom was doing live coverage of a fire at a power plant when a collapsing beam crushes both his colleagues. He later finds out that he was originally supposed to die there as well. It is only because a time traveling tourist from the future distracted him at the right moment that he survived in the first place.

    Literature 
  • In the book Swim to Me by Betsy Carter, Delores (the weathergirl who dresses up as a mermaid to do her reports. She's a professional mermaid/swimmer in shows when not on TV) is sent out specifically to be this girl during a hurricane watch. The drama is upped when she spots a drowning child and drops her mike to rescue him.
  • In Dave Barry's novel Tricky Business, the local Miami news station sends a reporter out to cover a tropical storm. She stands in water near downed power lines. Then they send a reporter out into the storm to cover the death of the reporter killed by the storm (And then another to report the death of that one, etc, etc). It gets worse when the station starts sending vehicles out, finally culminating in a helicopter crash. Ultimately, nine of the station's reporters are dead, representing 100% of the people killed by the storm. Both a Parody and an Exaggerated Trope.
  • Older Than Television: In The War of the Worlds, a journalist named Henderson appears early in the novel to investigate the fallen Martian cylinder. He dies by Death Ray not too much later. Henderson, possibly the earliest example of this trope in fiction, is also the Trope Codifier, so much so that his character was carried over in Orson Welles' 1938 radio show and the 1953 version, if not the 2005 version. The book also subverts the trope: the narrator himself is also a journalist, though he does come close to death on more than a few occasions.

    Live-Action TV 
  • An episode of Primeval features reporters who aren't smart enough to run away when a Giganotosaurus (think T. rex, only bigger) rampages through an airport.
  • Damien Day from Drop the Dead Donkey likes to pretend he's in serious danger. Parody meets Exploited Trope, as he's using the trope to attempt to gain better viewing figures.
  • Battlestar Galactica has a brief scene of Baltar watching the disjointed news reports of the Cylon attack. The 'man on the street reporter' hears the boom, feels the wind, then his feed and the feed from the news studio cut to static.
  • The Whose Line Is It Anyway skit "Newsflash" is a parody of this trope: it's based on putting Colin Mochrie in this role — only he doesn't know what he's reporting on. The skit uses greenscreen technology to run footage he can't see as his "on-the-scene" background. Watch here.
  • In The Goodies episode "Kitten Kong", it's played entirely for laughs. Watch it here, starting at 2:10
  • Parodied on The Daily Show. In their January 2012 Indecision coverage there is a skit about the upcoming South Carolina primary including an anchor in a windstorm and a female anchor covered in blood screaming about the horrors of the campaign.
  • In the Made-for-TV movie Special Bulletin, a reporter is standing near where the boat with the nuclear weapon, after the scientists attempting to disable it start running, saying that it's okay for him to stay since the deadline for the bomb to go off is still 15 minutes away, and is cut off in mid sentence by the nuclear explosion.

    Video Games 
  • In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Jeff gets killed after pursuing Lazarevic into a war zone without bringing any cops or guards along with him
  • Crackdown 2 shows a woman reporting on the freaks that are overrunning the city at night. Predictably, one of them pounces on her from the side of the screen.
  • Both Dead Rising games contain examples of this trope with intrepid reporters Frank West and (in the sequel) Rebecca Chang. Chang always dies.
    • Same deal in Off the Record but subverted in over time as Rebecca replaces Stacy and Katey from the original.
  • Ratchet & Clank gave us Darla Gratch (Channel 2 News), who has a tendency to get badly hurt wherever she reports. Good thing she's a robot.
  • Anna Hutchens in Odium, very excited to find herself reporting from the middle of a monster-filled city. Just think of the ratings! Though it's probably a good thing that your team found her just as she was cornered by monsters. She joins your team for a while, but fights about as well as you'd expect from a reporter...
  • Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars:
    • A Nod reporter is reporting from Sarajevo...just around the time the whole region, alongside most of the Balkans, is blown up by a Liquid Tiberium detonation. For bonus points, being a member of Nod, he was wearing red.
    • The GDI reporters oddly avert it though. One of them is in Washington when Philadelphia comes crashing down, the other in Vancouver, mere meters away from Nod forces and right in the attack zone of Vertigo bombers. They both survive.
  • In Final Fantasy VII when the pilar collapses, a reporter can be seen reacting just before the screen goes to static.
  • Leading up to the release of Mass Effect 3, the game's in-character twitter feed featured a series of live-tweets from Emily Wong, who was effectively the reporter-on-the-scene for The Reaper Invasion of Earth. Her last tweet indicated that she was mortally wounded and about to ram a Reaper with her skyvan.

    Western Animation 
  • The city of Detroit in Transformers Animated seems to have averted this by having their Red Shirt Reporter be a robot. Given all the weirdness that goes down in that city and how much that particular robot gets damaged, it seems to make the most sense.
  • Family Guy has utilized both "Asian Reporter" Trisha Takanawa and "Black-U-Weather" Ollie Williams in this role.
    Diane Simmons: ...while hurricane Norman continues to pound Quahog. We now go live to Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa for a look at how locals are dealing with the imminent disaster. Tricia?
    Tricia Takanawa: Diane, I'm here in— (hit by a flying car)
    Diane Simmons: Thank you, Tricia. Stay tuned for further— (hit by a flying guy)
  • Lance Thunder of Danny Phantom always gets put on 'Ghost Watch'- e.g. filming in streets overwhelmed by ghosts, desperately screaming "I'm just a weatherman!"
  • Showing up again in Godzilla: The Series as secondary characters, Audrey Timmonds and Victor "Animal" Palotti tend to be in the thick of the latest Godzilla vs Monster of the Week showdown.
  • Tripping the Rift has a reporter covering the new phenomenon of "evil" that Chode has introduced. He is explaining the concept of "stealing" when someone demands the microphone, and shoots the reporter when he refuses to hand it over.

    Real Life 
  • On MSNBC's coverage of Hurricane Ike, a reporter named Janet lampshaded this trope by declaring loudly that she was perfectly safe.
  • There was an incident where Ed Hughes, the late anchor for Norfolk, VA CBS affiliate WTKR, was covering a hurricane at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
  • Jim Cantore. Watch The Weather Channel any time there's a hurricane making landfall and you'll see this guy screaming into his microphone. He is so reliable about being where the weather is worst that there's a joke that if you see Jim Cantore in your home town, it's past time to have evacuated.
  • During one Hurricane hitting Maryland, a local reporter was broadcasting from Ocean City and stood near the completely flooded beach to give an idea of what the storm surge was doing. When he was nearly finished with his report, a wave crashed over the beach barrier, drenching the reporter, who deadpanned "Back to you" and returned us to a laughing news room.
  • Memphis' Action Five News had a series during the 90s featuring a reporter demonstrating how to get out of a flooded car, a flaming building and many other dangerous situations.
  • One of the favorite jokes of Neil Degrasse Tyson: "If a meteor were to hit the US pacific coast, nobody would have to die, because we would know weeks in advance. Only two people will die: That one surfer who tries to ride the wave, and that one weather reporter who is narrating how the wave is coming towards him."
  • Dan Rather is the Trope Codifier. His first major story as a reporter for KHOU-TV in Houston was the landfall of Hurricane Carla in 1961. He went to the National Weather Service office in Galveston, showed what was the first weather radar picture on television, and reported live from the Galveston Sea Wall as Carla hit the Texas coast. All while enduring floods, heavy wind, pounding rain, and snakes. Rather's tenacity got the attention of the higher-ups at CBS, and the rest is history.
  • One of the people killed alongside of George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was Mark Kellogg, a newspaper journalist embedded with the 7th Cavalry.
  • Atlantic editor Michael Kelly was killed while touring Iraq during the war in 2003.
  • A famous, non-weather related example of this is Ernie Pyle, one of the Second World War's most well-known and acclaimed correspondents, who was killed by a machine gun whilst covering the Okinawa campaign.
  • Anderson Cooper's modus operandi seems to be: a) find the current most dangerous and/or destroyed area of the world; b) go there; and c) win lots of accolades. He has covered Hurricane Katrina, tsunamis in Japan and Sri Lanka, earthquakes in Haiti and the Philippines, Baghdad at the height of the war, the Balkan civil war, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the Arab Spring. He's reported amid hurricane winds, bombs going off behind him, flying street signs, famine, and floodwaters, and while in Egypt got punched in the face repeatedly and at one point refused to give his location on-air because reporters were in so much danger. There's a reason he spends so much time in a bulletproof vest.
  • This trope sees your Anderson Cooper and raises you a Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News — aka "NBC News' widely recognized, highly respected, globe-trotting, bullet-dodging dreamboat." What he lacks in Cooper's geographic coverage, having spent the bulk (though by no means all) of his career in the Middle East, Central Europe and Asia, and Northern Africa, he more than makes up for in the sheer number of dangerous situations he's gotten himself into, to the point where he has a worrying habit of making his family and friends (including, most prominently, Rachel Maddow) very nervous. He snuck into Iraq in 2002 under the Saddam regime and was there for six years, living in people's spare rooms and couches under incredibly dangerous conditions, and seeing his friends and co-workers being killed and/or maimed around him (and he nearly got blown up). After that he reported from every nation involved in the Arab Spring, including Cairo the night Mubarak fell and rebel-held Libyan territory during the uprising against Ghaddafi (where he nearly got blown up on camera). Then he topped himself again by sneaking into Syria post-descent into civil war, and was kidnapped and held for five days — a situation he was sure he wouldn't get out of alive. After the latter incident, Maddow hugged him tightly and said, "Now you have to stay here and become a dentist." (He didn't, of course. He turned around and went right back to Syria.)
    Rachel Maddow: NBC's Richard Engel is on the ground in Libya. He is in rebel-held territory. Unhappily for us who know and love Richard, he has filed tonight more uncomfortably dramatic footage showing him way too close for comfort to the live-fire, live-ammunition fighting that is going on there on the ground. That footage, and Richard, live, next.
  • Norwegian reporter Odd Karsten Tveit is famous for his calm when reporting from conflict zones such as the middle east, as seen in this clip.


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