Christine Chubbuck[a] (August 24, 1944 – July 15, 1974) was an American television news reporter who worked for stations WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida.

The first person to die by suicide on a live television broadcast, Chubbuck shot herself in the head with a gun on July 15, 1974, during WXLT-TV's Suncoast Digest, after claiming that the network was about to present "an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide"; it was confirmed after her death that she had added the quote in her script for the broadcast, making the action likely premeditated.

That same year, she worked in Canton, Ohio, and, for three months, at WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as an assistant producer for two local shows, Women's World and Keys to the City.

[10] WXLT's owner, Bob Nelson, hired Chubbuck as a reporter, but later gave her a community affairs talk show, Suncoast Digest, which ran at 9:00 am.

[11] Chubbuck took her position seriously, inviting local officials from Sarasota and Bradenton to discuss matters of interest to the growing beach community.

[12] On occasion, Chubbuck incorporated homemade puppets she had used to entertain children with intellectual disabilities during her volunteer work at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.

Her brother Greg later recalled a man that she had gone out with several times before moving to Sarasota, but agreed that his sister had trouble connecting socially in the beach resort town.

She baked him a cake for his birthday and sought his romantic attention, only to find out he was already involved with sports reporter Andrea Kirby.

[10] A week before her suicide, she told night news editor Rob Smith that she had bought a gun and joked about killing herself on air.

[8] During the first eight minutes of her program, Chubbuck covered three national news stories and then a shooting from the previous day at a local restaurant, Beef & Bottle, at the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport.

[20] She had written something like "TV 40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program.

[23] Presbyterian minister Thomas Beason delivered the eulogy, stating, "We suffer at our sense of loss, we are frightened by her rage, we are guilty in the face of her rejection, we are hurt by her choice of isolation and we are confused by her message.

It was confirmed in June 2016 that the recording of Chubbuck's death exists and had indeed been in Nelson's possession, but was handed over to a "very large law firm" for safekeeping by Mollie.

[29][30] A widespread urban legend claims that Chubbuck's suicide inspired Paddy Chayefsky's script for the 1976 film Network, in which news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) announces that he will kill himself live on-air.

[31] Dave Itzkoff, author of Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, pointed out that Chayefsky was already working on the screenplay before Chubbuck's suicide.

The only mention of Chubbuck that Itzkoff could find in Chayefsky's notes and papers was in one of the later drafts of the screenplay, where a line that was later deleted has Beale saying he will commit suicide "right on the air ... like that girl in Florida".

When shooting Kate Plays Christine, director Robert Greene stated that "everyone he met in Sarasota believed that there was a connection" between Chubbuck and Network.

"[32] In 2003, Christopher Sorrentino published "Condition", a short story based on Chubbuck's suicide, in the literary magazine Conjunctions.