TMZ D.C. Knows It’s Not Above What It Covers
The gossip site’s early success in the capital shows that readers and audiences are hungry for political journalism that is as cynical as they are.
STROLLING TIPSILY OUT OF THE UFC FIGHT on the South Lawn of the White House earlier this month, comedian Shane Gillis was confronted by a man with a camera and an increasingly recognizable Australian accent: TMZ D.C.’s Charlie Cotton had some questions for him.
“What did you think of [Josh Hokit] saying Michelle Obama’s a man?” Cotton asked.
“I didn’t love that,” Gillis said.
“Didn’t love it? How come? A lot of people are saying the opposite,” Cotton prodded.
“Oh, I don’t like that [bleep],” Gillis replied, then laughing: “You guys got me on a couple brewskis.”
The same evening, Cotton encountered Texas Congressman Brandon Gill, who defended the remark as just a joke. Again, Cotton started to stir the pot: Were Hokit’s remarks really “all good, just like a funny joke? . . . Some people online were like, you know, outraged, obviously.”
“A lot of people . . .” “Some people online . . .” Cotton pushed at each of his interlocutors from the side of an imagined consensus opposing them. His method speaks to the larger M.O. of TMZ’s new political venture in the nation’s capital: forget right and left. Just seek out a controversy and see what happens.
And based on the buzz TMZ D.C. has generated over the past couple months—to say nothing of the embarrassment the outlet has already caused several lawmakers—you can’t say the approach isn’t working.
The celebrity gossip site’s expansion into Washington has generated an unusual amount of fascination and concern among traditional political reporters. To be sure, TMZ has earned its salacious reputation: The site has done pioneering work in the unsavory world of celebrity implosions, airport ambushes, public humiliation, and remunerated hearsay. But the political journalists’ consternation is also, at least in part, a sign that some of the outdated older media hierarchies continue to linger. It is getting harder to pretend politics and celebrity culture—and those who cover them—still belong to different spheres.
The barriers that formerly separated them have been collapsing for years. As one reporter put it, “Maybe a decade ago I would have been like, ‘that’s ridiculous. TMZ is a celebrity thing’ . . . but politics is ridiculous right now.” And the principles that govern entertainment coverage have long been operative in political journalism, too: conflict drives engagement, humiliation travels faster than careful analysis, personality matters more than institutions and processes. The ability to elicit attention is its own form of power.
TMZ long ago accepted these dynamics, and its new D.C. reporters are unabashed in embracing them as principles for developing their coverage.
A decade ago, Trump’s political ascent demonstrated that shamelessness can be a kind of superpower; his unrestrained, sometimes downright vile rhetoric endeared him to millions who voted him into the White House. TMZ D.C. may have a similar asset to leverage to win audience trust.
Consider the sorts of moments TMZ’s Washington operation has already produced. The outlet’s reporters aggressively tracked lawmakers vacationing during the partial government shutdown earlier this year, creating viral moments that got an extra boost from the public’s latent rage. They also generated attention through confrontational exchanges with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asking “do you feel like you’re on a power trip” when giving orders to launch lethal strikes. (The writeup ran with a form-perfect headline: “TMZ DC to Pete Hegseth: Do You Get Off On Dropping Bombs???”) Their irreverent and aggro style caused a lesser-known Republican House member to lash out after being called “bro” and getting pressed over his party’s role in causing the shutdown: “You’re not being respectful. Don’t talk to me any more. . . . talk to the fucking Democrats!”
OVER THE PAST FOUR DECADES, institutional political media has adapted surprisingly quickly to drastic changes in journalism’s ecosystem without giving up the language of older professional ideals. Cable news panels are a good example: They have become Jerry Springer–styled conflict programming with partisan celebrities cast in recurring roles, as in Abby Phillip’s CNN roundtable; the appeal is in the drama of the proceedings, not the high-mindedness of the conversation.1 Then, too, journalists have had to become something like journalist-influencers, complete with monetizable followings, sponsored Substacks, and the occasional undisclosed partisan freelancing. And even established legacy publications are liable to obsess over engagement metrics, just as any content creator would.
But nobody does it quite like the original. TMZ’s advantage over its legacy competitors primarily has to do with personality: TMZ does not ask audiences to believe it is above what it covers. “A big story could be what an intern is saying about a fellow intern. A big story could be who clogged the toilet in one of the House office buildings,” said TMZ’s Jakson Buhaj. This candid tone is much easier to credit than the stentorian affect of, say, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
TMZ’s frankness is also implicating for anyone who imagines they operate above its level. “They’re not going to ask serious policy questions,” said one anonymous political reporter about the gossip rag’s arrival in town. But one wonders how many times that reporter’s own rag wrote about Biden’s footwear, how Ron DeSantis eats his pudding, or the mentalist performer enlisted to entertain guests at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The gap between the lofty ideals of the Fourth Estate and the sensationalistic, even occasionally demeaning coverage cycle to which many legacy media outlets have become bound is partly why public trust in media has significantly eroded over the last decade. Primed for cynicism by outside voices who declaim against the corruption of journalism—Trump himself foremost among the critics—audiences imagine themselves canny to the true nature of political reporting. They have seen how outrage drives traffic. They have a sense that access shapes coverage. They suspect that journalists cultivate personas to land book deals and cable hits. TMZ D.C.’s gambit is to endorse their audience’s cynicism.
TO BE SURE, TMZ’s STYLE OF REPORTING can feel invasive, vulgar, excessive, even socially corrosive. They have a reputation for doing things—like paying sometimes thousands of dollars for tips and scoops—other journalists would consider objectionable or even unethical. But they know their audience will forgive them and continue to trust and seek out their coverage so long as they continue refusing to pretend to be something they’re not.
They’ve even found a way to put their own higher-minded spin on their unconventional approach to reporting on the Hill. “We know everything about the Real Housewives, yet we know nothing about the members of Congress who control our lives . . . and we pay their salaries,” remarked Cotton, one member of TMZ’s D.C. trio. Might the public do a better job holding their representatives to account if they take a recreational interest in the details of their lawmakers’ daily doings?
The lawmakers themselves seem to be apprehensive about such scrutiny. One congressman has floated the idea that TMZ’s aggressive coverage contributed to Congress finally working together to end the protracted DHS shutdown this spring. “I think the work at TMZ had a big reason why people wanted to get this done before they went home. . . . TMZ is changing the way we do things in Washington,” reflected Virginia freshman Rep. Suhas Subramanyam.
This helps explain some of the professional anxiety that has attended the outlet’s expansion. Questions of journalistic standards and professionalism aside, political reporters are watching what many would consider a lower-status organization make their way in the modern attention economy more fluidly than many operations purpose-built to cover Washington. Much of the prestige the political journalism establishment still enjoys is the fruit of a period when audiences depended on centralized media organizations to mediate public reality and determine the parameters of our fact-based political commons; gatekeeping was an accepted function of the guild. Social media platforms wrecked that dependency years ago. Audiences no longer think within the prior categories; they move fluidly between cable news clips, streamers, influencers, group chats, and more, developing a picture of the world that includes input from many dissimilar sources.
This does not make TMZ healthy for democratic culture. If anything, the opposite is probably true. The same dynamics that make the outlet effective also intensify the worst tendencies of the modern information environment. TMZ’s business model depends on decontextualizing quotations, baiting or provoking subjects into speaking heedlessly, and enlisting the audience to dredge the muck, all to eventually create new, endlessly circulatable content. At scale, the approach would transform public life into a sequence of context-free spectacles, and consumers of the content would not come away from it with any greater civic understanding. But legacy media has already compressed the news to fit its own mold of this kind; TMZ’s presence may accelerate this ignoble trend, but the outlet can’t be said to be introducing it.2
The most consequential implication of TMZ’s arrival in Washington is ultimately what it suggests about news consumers. Audiences appear ready to trust this media organization that has no qualms about its transactional nature and its complicated relationship with attention, power, and profit, and to credit its approach more than they do that of its legacy competitors that continue to pretend to be above it all.
Yet the outlet’s quick start suggests a darker possibility beyond the public simply finding a more cynical publication to appeal to its cynical mood. TMZ D.C.’s early success could also mean the public clearly understands the toxic incentives that drive both our politics and our political media and is happy to continue rewarding them anyway. Besides: if so much of our political culture is a joke, but you don’t feel as though you have the power to change anything about it, it’s at least better to be in on that joke than the sort of rube who falls for it. And TMZ D.C. is happy to let you feel like you’re at least in on the joke.
Phillip’s recent career moves exemplify the larger industry trend: Her latest venture is a new CNN program called Confessions and Obsessions, which passes over politics entirely in an attempt to court younger audiences by covering the sorts of things you might scroll by in your TikTok feed.
Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that scandalmongering is a journalistic practice with a history in this country that goes back to the founding; TMZ D.C.’s innovation has to do with combining the techniques and scale of contemporary digital media to pursue their aims while also remaining nonpartisan—flinging the mud at whoever is closest to the mud-pit.
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