Tenure Denied: A Retired Journalism Professor Grades TV's Fake Newspapers and Nobody Is Safe

I taught journalism for 31 years at a midwestern state school you have definitely never applied to. I retired in 2019. My wife said find a hobby. My doctor said lower my sodium. I did neither, and instead I have spent the past several months doing what no one else was brave enough or unemployed enough to do: evaluating the editorial credibility of the fictional newspapers sitting on coffee tables, folded under arms, and dramatically slapped onto desks across the history of American television and film.

These publications have evaded accountability for decades. Not today. Not on my watch.

The Metropolis Daily Planet: A Globe-Trotting Institution With No Copy Editors

Let's start with the big one. The Daily Planet employs, at minimum, one of the most prolific investigative reporters in human history and yet its front page reads like it was written by someone who has never met a noun. Headlines in Metropolis tend toward the poetic: "IT FLIES!" was apparently deemed sufficient coverage of a man in a cape defying physics over the business district.

From a standards-and-practices standpoint, this is a catastrophe. Where is the attribution? Who witnessed the flight? What is the flight's altitude? A first-semester student of mine would have this story bounced back with more red ink than a grading marathon. And yet the Planet has the audacity to run a globe on its masthead, implying worldwide reach, while its entire newsroom appears to consist of seven people and one phone that only rings during plot-relevant moments.

Credibility rating: 2.5 out of 10. Extra half point because Perry White has never once misspelled "Great Caesar's Ghost."

The Twin Peaks Ledger-Dispatch: Local Coverage at Its Most Disturbingly Thorough

Now here is a paper doing the work. Whatever the Ledger-Dispatch lacks in name recognition — and I have been unable to confirm whether the Ledger and the Dispatch merged, and frankly the absence of a merger anniversary piece is itself a red flag — it makes up for in commitment to covering a single town's increasingly horrifying news cycle with the dogged persistence of a paper that has no other options.

The coverage of the Palmer case was exhaustive. Was it tasteful? Debatable. Was it accurate? The paper reported exactly what happened, which is more than I can say for most outlets, fictional or otherwise. My only structural criticism is that the paper seems to publish on a schedule determined by vibes rather than a print run.

Credibility rating: 7 out of 10. Docked points for publishing logs. Actual logs. Wood. I have concerns.

The Springfield Shopper: A Cautionary Tale

The Springfield Shopper is what happens when a paper serves a town that changes its own history weekly. One issue endorses a monorail; the next issue pretends the monorail never existed. There is no institutional memory, no editorial continuity, and — I say this with genuine academic concern — the paper once ran a headline that was literally just "OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD."

And yet. And yet. That headline is more honest than half the op-ed pages in America. The Shopper knows what it is. It is a paper that will print anything, which paradoxically makes it the most transparent publication on this list.

Credibility rating: 4 out of 10, with a footnote: highest headline accuracy-to-effort ratio in the industry.

The Daily Bugle: When the Op-Ed Page Commits Libel in Bold Type

I want to be very clear, because my tenure file once survived a similar accusation: the Daily Bugle is not a newspaper. It is a grudge with a printing press. Its publisher has weaponized the front page against one specific young man for the better part of two decades, running unsubstantiated claims with a confidence that would get a real editor disbarred, if editors could be disbarred, which I have lobbied for.

The Bugle's sourcing is one angry man in a mustache. Its editorial independence is compromised by its editorial obsession. Its photography, however, is genuinely exceptional — suspiciously exceptional — and I have notes for a follow-up investigation on that front.

Credibility rating: 1 out of 10. The single point is for distribution logistics. Those papers get everywhere.

Honorable Mentions From the Stacks

The Raccoon City Times gets points for running breaking news until literally the moment of publication's demise. Dedication. The Hill Valley Telegraph, meanwhile, has the unique distinction of having its coverage altered retroactively by time travel, which I believe makes it the only paper in history to issue corrections to events that had not happened yet. Peer review taken to its logical extreme.

The Final Grade

Here is what thirty-one years and one unrequested retirement taught me: these fictional papers fail every real test of journalism — accuracy, fairness, independence, basic copyediting — and yet every single one of them would be more fun to work for than the actual outlets that turned my best students into SEO content farms.

The Daily Planet has a superhero on payroll. The Bugle has passion, albeit weaponized. The Shopper has a headline writer who saw a cloud and went to war.

Maybe credibility isn't the point. Maybe the point is that somewhere out there, a newsroom still has a globe in the lobby and a boss who yells your name across the room. Lower your sodium. Keep your standards. Read the paper, even the fake ones. Especially the fake ones.

Professor emeritus of absolutely nowhere. Office hours: never.