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1983 American drama TV film by Edward Zwick
a movie

Special Bulletin is a 1983 American drama television film directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall Herskovitz, based on a story by both. It was an early collaboration between the two, who would later produce such series as thirtysomething and My So Called Life. The film was first broadcast March 20, 1983 on NBC as part of NBC Sunday Night at the Movies. In the film, a terrorist group brings a homemade atomic bomb aboard a tugboat in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina in order to blackmail the U. S. government into disabling its nuclear weapons, and the incident is caught live on television. It simulates a series of live news broadcasts on the fictional RBS Network. WTMJ TV in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the only NBC affiliate which refused to air the film out of concern that, as station president Mike McCormick stated, "people will be deceived into believing it's an actual telecast." However, some other NBC affiliates preempted the broadcast because they had previously scheduled local programming for the evening, before the film was placed by the network into that timeslot at the last minute.

Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide rated Special Bulletin "way above average." The Washington Post described it as "A shrewd, keen, wise, hip, occasionally lacerating and sometimes gravely funny dark parody of network TV news coverage." Also, "At times, the unfolding story in Special Bulletin comes across as ludicrous, but then one has to think, how much more ludicrous is it than some of the actual news events of the past 15 years or so, and the way television has honed its way of covering them? It's a process that deserves scrutiny not just in poker faced journals and ivory tower think tanks but on television. Praiseworthy trailblazers like the ABC News late night Viewpoint broadcasts have done this one way. Special Bulletin does it in another way not a better one, perhaps, but in one more accessible to greater numbers of viewers."

Special Bulletin was nominated for six Emmy awards and won four, including Outstanding Drama Special. It also won Directors Guild of America and Writers Guild of America prizes for Zwick and Herskovitz, as well as the Humanitas Prize, the latter award which irked former NBC president Reuven Frank. In his book on TV news, Out of Thin Air, Frank called Special Bulletin "junk" and claimed he wanted to return his own Humanitas Prize in protest, "but I couldn't find it."

Lorimar Home Video issued Special Bulletin on VHS and Betamax, and Warner Home Video would later reissue it; these releases omit the on screen "dramatization" overlay. Starting in January 2010, Warner Bros. made the film available on DVD for one year as part of its Warner Archive Collection. Warner's rights have since reverted to the production company and the DVD is currently out of print.