The news

Two Weazel News items: aerial footage under a LIVE badge, the Weazel block with a clock reading 10:34 ET, a red headline banner and a strapline, and stories that read like the things a player does: a flipped car after a dine and dash, thugs on motorbikes.

At 1:03.57 a broadcast fills the frame under a fine screen pattern. It is aerial footage of a wet stretch of highway: a car on its roof in the middle lanes, yellow crash barrels knocked over around it, and two pale police cars beside it with their light bars lit and a door open on each. A white van, a black SUV and a grey sedan are among the cars on the lanes around them. A red LIVE badge sits at the top left.

Along the bottom is the Weazel block: WEAZEL in black on white over NEWS in white on red, black stripes beside it and 10:34 ET on a dark strip below. Next to it a red banner reads NO (OVER) TURNING ZONE!, and under that a white strapline reads COPS ARREST MAN WHO FLIPPED HIS CAR AFTER PEEWEES DINE AND DASH. Until 27 September 2026 this page called the footage a helicopter feed over a rain-soaked junction with the traffic stopped: no helicopter is in the frame, no rain falls in it, and a still does not show traffic stopping.

A second item at 1:06.67 carries the same block, a banner reading DIRT-BIKE DIRT-BAGS and a strapline, COPS FAIL TO STOP THUGS ON MOTORBIKES TERRORIZING VICE CITY. Under that is a third line in lighter type on a dark strip: headlines separated by dashes, beginning mid-word and cut off at both ends of its strip, which stops well short of both edges of the screen. The visible part reads ped mental patient wins Vice City marathon, then Leonida man sucked up in waterspout demands the city buy him a new suit, then Vice City girls offic before the strip ends. The strapline above it is a single line complete within its strip, not the ticker this page once called it.

A news helicopter in the press pack has a page of its own, with the slogan it carries read there; nothing on it names the station, and nothing in these two frames shows what filmed them. What the frames do establish is how the game dresses its news: aerial footage under a live badge, a station block with a clock, a headline banner, a strapline and a ticker. Whether that plays on televisions inside the world, and how closely its stories follow what the player does, the frames we have do not say.

How to recognise it

• The Weazel News block: WEAZEL over NEWS in white on red, 10:34 ET below
• A red LIVE badge at the top left of the first item
• Aerial footage of a wet highway, a car on its roof and two police cars beside it
• A red banner headline over a white strapline
• A second item, DIRT-BIKE DIRT-BAGS, with a line of headlines under its strapline

The frame it comes from

The frame is Trailer 1 at 1:03.57. It is 3840 by 2160, and the subject occupies 3840 by 1944 of it. Also in it: Weazel News, a white panel van with a lettered livery, and a police car.

How this was measured

These figures come from the dataset, not from the prose above. We measure everything and claim what counts. How we work

What we still do not know

• Whether broadcasts react to the player’s actions
• Whether you can watch the news on a television you own
• Whether Mega Noticias, the Spanish-language station, runs the same stories
• What films the footage, and whether a news helicopter can be shot down