The date is July 25, 2009, and the media world is in absolute shambles. The L.A. Times has just confirmed that Michael Jackson — arguably the world’s biggest star at the time — has died. But the Times didn’t break the story — an entire hour before the Times published their report, TMZ announced that the artist had suffered a cardiac arrest and passed away. TMZ had already been in existence for four years at the time, but it was on that day, the 25th of July, that they would be legitimized as a site to be trusted, reckoned with, and eventually, loathed.
But the world should’ve seen TMZ coming: the sudden boom of reality television in the 90’s and early aughts paved the way for gossip websites and blogs following the every steps of the D-list stars these shows bore, and their strategic struggle to rise to A-list status. For every Kim Kardashian or Nicole Richie battling for any form of social relevance, there was a Perez Hilton or Just Jared lurking outside their fence, hoping for some exclusive shot or story. TMZ took that model and dialed it up to a hundred. Where Perez Hilton was unsystematic and informal, TMZ was organized and business-oriented, following a strict model that posited them as home for stories that even the most secretive celebrities fought to keep hidden.
In the time since then, however, TMZ has morphed into something much more vulturous, with zero regard for journalistic ethics, and plain old human decency. And as celebrity culture slowly crumbles under the weight of the tumultuous year that is 2020, their reputation as a one-stop shop for feeding our voyeuristic fascination with public figures has been marred with the immorality of their practices as a media corporation. In January for example, TMZ broke the news that Kobe Bryant had died in a tragic helicopter crash, despite the fact that the authorities had just received reports of the crash barely an hour before. The LA County Sheriff censured the website, saying that the families of the deceased had not yet been notified of the death of their loved ones.
More recently, they’ve come under fire for announcing the death of former Glee actress Naya Rivera, four entire hours before the police could confirm it themselves.
During a 2014 interview with Fox News, Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, considered it funny that people questioned their tactics, saying, “We’re a news operation. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to do as a news operation is chase down stories… That’s the job.” Their business model is one that puts revenue and clicks first, with empathy taking a backseat. They set out to break news at the expense of victims who’ve yet begun to grieve the death of their family members, mostly because they’re not aware of the need to grieve just yet. But Levin’s comment that they’re “a news corporation,” and “that’s the job” beg an even greater, more complex question about the culture that’s allowed for the creation and flourishing of such a job in the first place.
The nature of the parasocial relationships we as a society have with media figures has evolved a great deal over the years. We have become just as infatuated with the people who entertain us, as much as we are with the entertainment they’re paid to produce. It’s not enough to learn every single lyric on Britney Spears’ latest album, but we also feel the need to know where she’s having lunch, and what time she goes to bed. There’s a sense of intimacy we derive from our knowledge of a celebrity’s every move, one that the tabloids have fueled with every front page detailing the in-and-outs of their lives. And as our hunger for celebrity gossip grew ever stronger (driven to unforeseen heights by the onset of reality TV and the internet, no less), TMZ became the highly-functional kitchen table from which we could feed. With TMZ, every crumb became a full-course meal: In 2016, while the world celebrated the birth of Kobe and Vanessa Bryant’s third child, TMZ took it a step further by obtaining the actual birth certificate of the new-born. They’re also known for uncovering police documents revealing the brushes our favorite celebrities have had with the law. These little tidbits make us feel more acquainted with these celebrities, as though we’ve been let in on a little secret.
The current craze of TMZ is a mutated manifestation of the world’s obsession with celebrities, and the perpetual proclivity for infiltrating their personal space. But the culture has evolved yet again — the veil of mindless celebrity worship has fallen from the faces of those who pride themselves in their idolatry. At the end of the day, celebrities are people, and we have much more to contain ourselves with than who Taylor Swift is dating. The problem, however, is that TMZ is still falling behind with no foreseeable desire to catch up to a world whose interest in celebrity is no longer the obsession it used to be. This discrepancy is observed in the petitions calling for TMZ to be taken down as a result of their indecent handling of celebrity tragedies.
But TMZ is run by a lawyer — Harvey Levin is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and was an active attorney for two decades — so they know to carefully toe the line of legality without ever really crossing it. Their practices may be unethical, but there is no law that they are breaking. Tabloids like TMZ rely on the protection of “information gathering” and “freedom of the press” in the First Amendment, which shields them from any legal action against their aggressive investigation techniques. It’s a provision that’s easily skewed to fit the needs of those invoking it, but one that exists nonetheless. So if consumers are not totally to blame (at least not as much as before), and even the law is on their side, how is TMZ still TMZ?
Following criticisms of their breaking of Kobe Bryant’s death, Levin revealed to FOX 11 that TMZ “got a tip that this had happened…it was from somebody who would have been in a position to know this and it wasn’t enough for me or for the team, so we worked for a solid hour after making a slew of phone calls.” The idea that TMZ has on its payroll a slew of first responders, medical professionals, and even court clerks that tip them off regarding these tragedies is no new information, neither is it a far-fetched concept. In fact, an article in The New Yorker in 2016 mentioned that TMZ has a “deep network of sources” that include lawyers, police and court officials, and even laypeople who happen to find themselves at the right place at the right time. In 2012, TMZ developed sources among employees at the Beverley Hilton Hotel, all of which yielded the infamous photo of the bathtub in which Whitney Houston’s body was found. And two L.A.P.D officers received reproof for selling photos of Rihanna’s bruised face to the site. Tips for exclusive stories, pictures, and videos receive anywhere between fifty dollars and a few hundred thousand dollars. (They receive over a hundred tips a day.)
TMZ’s seeming acts of journalistic misconduct are only as bad as the people who enable them, so when a court clerk or police officer breaches confidentiality by selling a story to TMZ for money (which many other news corporations are unwilling to give), then there’s nowhere to go but south. Their publication of images from Bryant’s crash site, for example, was only possible because deputies from the L.A. County Sheriff’s department shared them. They broke the story of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant during his DUI arrest in 2006 because the deputy who arrested Gibson informed Levin.
In the end then, the blame is to be levied on a greedy capitalist culture equipped with an absolute lack of empathy and concern for the people it screws over in its pursuit of wealth, regardless of where said wealth stems. It cares not for selling out victims of sexual and domestic abuse, or victims of tragic events (as is often the case with TMZ exclusives), in favor of clicks, shares, and ad revenue. It’s no surprise that our schadenfreude is tied to our obsession with celebrities — many of tabloid’s best-selling stories are those of sex tapes, DUI’s, and court cases of media personalities — which in turn lines their pockets. Said celebrities sometimes profit from their own misfortune (look no further than the many spin-off seasons and shows the Kardashians have been able to spawn from their many media mishaps). But shouldn’t there be a line? Shouldn’t some celebrity-related events be handled with more delicacy? The way in which the story of Naya Rivera’s passing was handled has renewed a conversation about ethics in breaking news journalism that has had TMZ at its center since 2009.
Celebrity culture is a twisted, forward-charging machine accruing wealth, fame, and growing toxicity with little care for the people within it. It charges forward at the expense of privacy and dignity the stars sacrifice so as to survive the culture, and TMZ is a breathing embodiment of the ruthlessness of the celebrity monolith. For as long as celebrity culture continues to exist, then TMZ (or some variation of the tabloid) will continue to thrive without need for re-evaluation. TMZ with its methods might be a curse, but celebrity culture is the higher power from which it stems, and celebrity culture needs to die.
