BREAKING THE news of Michael Jackson's death has made the website TMZ the new AP/Reuters of celebrity journalism. The controversial site is now pulling in around eight million viewers a week thanks to a series of "exclusives" and what, in retrospect, have turned out to be accurate reports of the behaviour of the rich and famous, writes BRIAN BOYD
It has deep pockets (it is part-owned by the giant Time-Warner media company) and has sources that allegedly include high-ranking police officers, courtroom officials, hospital workers and anyone who has any up-close-and-personal contact with a celebrity.
TMZ has admitted to paying for “tip-offs” and their aggressive use of this “chequebook” style of journalism has made their site a heady cocktail of news, gossip and insinuation that is quickly becoming a world-beater.
As some indication of how on top of the Jackson story they were, TMZ posted their world exclusive “Jackson is dead” online six minutes before the star’s time of death. This was because a source within the UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles had informed them before the official declaration by the hospital.
Prior to the Jackson exclusive, the site – which specialises in video footage of celebrities behaving badly – had broken the story about Mel Gibson being drunk and spouting anti-Semitic insults at a traffic and posted the rather aggressive and insulting telephone message the actor Alec Baldwin left on his 11-year-old's answering machine. It also ran the police photographs of the badly beaten up singer Rhianna earlier this year. Combining the celebrity fetish of sites such as Gawker with the "undisclosed documents" appeal of The Smoking Gun and appealing to a generation raised on Heatand OK! Magazine, TMZ is now the "most bookmarked" site around.
So much celebrity journalism reaches us only after it has been photoshopped/touched-up/vetted by the celebrity gate-keepers (a celeb’s management team, etc) – an aspect of the entertainment media which provoked the site’s debut.
“In many ways, publicists ran Hollywood before we came along,” TMZ’s founder Mark Levin has said. “They would set the topics, they would set the agenda, they would tell these magazine shows what they could or couldn’t do. The power they had would be to say, ‘We won’t give you the interviews you really want, unless you play ball with us’.”
By seemingly being able to access the people inside a private courtroom or beside a hospital bed, TMZ can offer the full, and for many, tawdry and transgressive, exclusive. When the actress Natasha Richardson had her fatal skiing accident, it didn’t go unnoticed that much of the information TMZ had about her condition could only have been known to medical staff.
The site takes its name from an old Hollywood trade union stipulation – the “TMZ” that anything filmed outside a 30-mile radius of the centre of Hollywood would qualify as a “location” shoot and rates would have to be re-negotiated.
It was also an unwritten agreement between the media and the film studios for years past that any “incidents of a romantic nature” between movie stars taking place outside the TMZ would not be reported on.
Mark Levin is an ex-lawyer and TV reporter who reluctantly took on the job of running the site when it debuted in 2005. Somewhat ambiguously Levin says that he doesn’t pay for stories but he does pay for “tip-offs”. He seems a bit surprised by the extent of the appetite out there for celebrity news/gossip. Shortly after the site went online they posted a seven second video clip of Britney Spears walking across a Las Vegas hotel lobby. There was no sound on the video. Nothing happened. But within seven days this clip was streamed 110,000 times by TMZ readers. “I think the definition of news is broader than what some people call news,” Levin noted at the time.
The site relies heavily on paparazzi videos – which it admits to paying for (and handsomely so, by all accounts). Numerous videos on the site show celebrities being chased in their cars by paparazzi – conjuring up eerie images of Princess Diana’s demise.
While TMZ has its admirers – the celebrity news blogger Perez Hilton says: “I love it; they’re able to buy paparazzi video, which I can’t afford to get. They have a lot more financial resources” and others in the area refer to Levin and his team of reporters as “the hardest working journalists around” – its detractors are many, and growing.
Gawker refers to Levin as “a schlocky managing editor of a thieving celebrity news conglomerate” while Alec Baldwin, who was distressed to find the contents of his private, if intemperate (to put it mildly) phone call to his daughter up on the site, says that Levin is “a human tumour, a graceless character who lives in that weird netherworld. He seems to be that breed of tabloid creature that realises an almost sexual level of pleasure from ruining other people’s lives.”
The site’s many readers may not be unduly troubled by the journalistic ethics of how a TMZ exclusive is sourced but, since the Jackson story, people are now openly asking how TMZ was able to reveal the star was dead before even the hospital announced it. Surely any person – regardless of celebrity provenance – who has suffered a cardiac arrest and has a group of doctors desperately trying to resuscitate him/her is reasonably entitled to privacy? The answer now seems to be: not if a TMZ exclusive depends on it.
As the joke now goes: wouldn’t it have been far better if Michael Jackson had announced the death of TMZ?