TMZ Gets Political
In late March, grainy photographs of the Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham relaxing at Disney World spread across the internet. One of these images showed Graham gripping a pink-and-blue bubble wand inspired by “The Little Mermaid.” Graham had a dilatory air, as though he’d somehow drifted off to a distant place. The photo’s caption wagged that Graham’s “fantasyland” surroundings, in the “Tangled” section of the theme park, couldn’t be more “on the nose—Congress is living in one, with each side blaming the other for its failure to reach a compromise that would reopen the government . . . believing voters are buying what they’re selling.”
This commentary was not from a wonkish TikToker nor a network pundit but from TMZ, the merciless purveyor of celebrity dirt, which published the images of Graham after a citizen vacationer noticed the senator flitting through the theme park and sent pictures. Known for its screeching headlines, up-to-the-second scoops, and contentious practice of paying off sources for scandalous tips, the tabloid has widened its pitiless lens to include officials across the political spectrum. Officials need not be as nationally recognizable as Graham to make the cut: within the last few weeks, TMZ has run surreptitious photos of John James, a Republican representative from Michigan, unwinding in the Caribbean, and others of Marsha Blackburn, a Republican U.S. senator for Tennessee, suitcase in tow, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
TMZ is, to put it generously, a controversial outfit that few would admit to reading regularly. The publication routinely breaks news—such as the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, and key developments concerning the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today Show” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie—often employing ruthless tactics to obtain such significant stories. Their brutal approach to tracking down entertainers has earned them a litany of enemies. In 2007, TMZ reported on a disturbing voice mail that Alec Baldwin had left for his daughter; nearly a decade later, in a 2016 article, by Nicholas Schmidle, in this magazine, Baldwin described the site’s founder and executive producer Harvey Levin as “a festering boil on the anus of American media.”
But even some of TMZ’s usual detractors have applauded its pivot to name-and-shame political coverage. Commenting on a Times story about the phenomenon, one commenter wrote, “I don’t trust TMZ as far as I can throw them but this is a friendly reminder that we do have a voice.” “Sad do-nothings,” another reader quipped, adding, “Give them the B-lister treatment, TMZ!” On Sunday, TMZ reported that Britney Spears had checked into rehab following an alleged D.U.I. arrest; a post on X urged the site to “go back to telling us about politicians.”
After the latest U.S. partial government shutdown began, on February 14th, Levin put out a call for photos of congresspeople relishing their spring recess. The public delivered. In one post, the tabloid sniped that more than thirty members of Congress were in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the break. (Headline: “BUST OUT THE BAGPIPES, WE’RE IN SCOTLAND!!!”) Images of the Texas senator Ted Cruz sitting on a plane live alongside TMZ’s ample shots of stars’ breasts—a common enough feature that the site has a dedicated “celebrity boobs” tag. Yet TMZ has taken to ripping elected officials with a searing scrutiny beyond even what it usually reserves for its favored celebrity targets. In doing so, the tabloid has become an improbable fount of accountability in a political era characterized by impasse, fear, and an ad-nauseam passing of the buck.
TMZ’s broadened focus on the government is not a swerve but, rather, a circuitous end to Levin’s decades-long quest to fully own the nexus of celebrity and political opprobrium. Long before the site ran scoops about members of Congress traipsing around Edinburgh Castle, a young Levin harbored political aspirations. He studied political science as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and considered a Ph.D. in the discipline.
Two years after TMZ made an aggressive début in the tabloid sphere, in 2007, Levin sent an employee to Washington to scope out office space; he wanted to cover Washington, D.C., with the same dishiness that had worked so well for him in Los Angeles. But TMZ’s parent company at the time, Time Warner, balked at potential regulatory snarls that could arise from paparazzi and tipsters descending upon the district, according to a Bloomberg report. The company shelved plans for the TMZ D.C. bureau. (In 2021, Fox Entertainment acquired TMZ from WarnerMedia.)
TMZ has covered politics since the failed D.C. bid, sometimes seemingly according to Levin’s proclivities. Two of the site’s staffers told Bloomberg that they were limited in reporting on President Donald Trump’s scandals during his 2016 run—the kinds of stories that TMZ would ordinarily sprint toward. The seventy-five-year-old Levin, a supporter of socially liberal causes who boosted Trump in the early years of his first term, reportedly had a falling out with the President in 2018, over the Administration’s intention to restrict transgender people from serving in the military. Following their beef, TMZ has taken a notably pointed approach to covering Trump, reporting on the sexual accusations against the President in the Epstein files, and posting about how California governor Gavin Newsom “savagely trolled” Trump after the President posted an A.I.-generated image of himself resembling Jesus.
Politics has never been TMZ’s focal point, but political issues that aggrieve Levin personally have steered the outlet’s coverage from its inception. While growing up, in the San Fernando Valley, Levin saw fame’s capacity to protect certain people from the consequences of the law. His father, who owned a liquor store, grappled with frequent sting operations from officials claiming that minors were purchasing alcohol there. It incensed Levin that, meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, teen-age celebrities clinked perspiring glasses of champagne in night clubs, with little consequence. “Harvey thought it was so unfair that these clubs would get away with it, just because they were selling to celebrities,” a former TMZ publicist told The New Yorker in 2016. As a counterpoint to the common media practice of deifying celebrities in well-composed shots fit for print, or attempting to humanize them in clearly planned errand-running shots, TMZ first made a name for itself by publishing pixelated cellphone shots of haggard-looking A-listers.
After a casino owner turned TV star first became President of the United States, media networks further beefed up their political coverage by treating it like entertainment, amplifying juicy play-by-plays over granular dissections of policy. CNN’s former president, Jeff Zucker, once told the Times Magazine that he aspired to imbue some aspects of ESPN into CNN’s political reporting—a move that has further framed politicians as entertainers rather than as employees who answer to the American public. Some officials have taken advantage of this, stepping into their roles with panache, mudslinging among themselves, and rattling off speeches primed for virality rather than for substance. The transformation of politicians into celebrities has fomented ideal conditions, in other words, for TMZ to chase elected officials with the same feverish intensity that they employ to snap a rumored celebrity couple leaving the Chateau Marmont together.
The partial shutdown began in February, 2026, when the Republican-led U.S. Senate deadlocked over a vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The G.O.P. had insisted on shoring up funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to pass the resolution, a nonstarter for Democrats. Republicans then rejected the revised legislation, and the government shuttered in turn. Then elected officials went on a two-week recess. The fight is less about the Department of Homeland Security and more about the pathologies of modern politics, in which liberals and conservatives alike have been unwilling to cede any political turf—a perpetual game of chicken that’s caused thousands of federal employees to work for months without pay.
That this stalemate has dragged on this long has infuriated Levin, who considers keeping the government functioning a basic tenet of Congress’s job. A few weeks into the shutdown, a T.S.A. worker named Rebecca Wolf appeared on “TMZ Live,” a gossipy weekday show produced inside the company’s L.A. studio space, featuring Levin and one of the show’s executive producers, Charles Latibeaudiere. Levin, typically springy, glowered as Wolf told them about how the shutdown had devastated her life. She’d contemplated selling her vehicle, adding that her last paycheck had come out to a paltry $13.53; in another video, Wolf shared that she’d considered suicide.
At the end of the interview, Levin speaks directly into the camera, pleading with his fellow-citizens to send photos of politicians doing anything but their jobs. “They can’t reach some agreement, some compromise to pay these people who are losing their houses, losing their cars, losing their livelihood, becoming sacrificial lambs so people can have a political gain,” he seethes. Later in the episode, he adds, if “you see one of the five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, take a picture and send it to us at TMZ. We will post that picture on our website, on our social media, and we will put it on our television shows. We want to show what they are doing at your expense.” The photos flooded in.
Politicians, seeing themselves splashed all over TMZ’s homepage, scrambled to walk back their vacation plans. As if to underscore the outlet’s point, they took aim at their colleagues across the aisle rather than acknowledging that they were eating out on taxpayers’ dimes. Graham claimed that he had been in Florida to meet with Trump officials prior to his Disney World jaunt, adding that he “voted seven times to fully fund the government. Call a Democrat.” (As for the bubble wand: apparently he was holding it for a child using the bathroom.) When TMZ nabbed photos of the Rhode Island representative Seth Magaziner, a Democrat, co-hosting a watch party with the stars of “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” he jumped on “TMZ Live” to defend himself, pointing the finger at House Speaker Mike Johnson for dismissing officials before a consensus. Anticipating that someone might tip off TMZ about his presence at Disney World, the Republican Florida senator Rick Scott posted a photo of himself mugging for the camera there. “Hey TMZ. Yes, I’m at Disney with my grandkids. Should we be in DC? Yes! But I don’t get to make that decision,” he wrote in the post. TMZ ran the photo of Scott, scoffing, “It’s sort of like saying, not my job, man.”
TMZ has expanded its ranks following the success of this heightened political focus. On April 13th, timed to the week that members of Congress return from their spring recess, the long-awaited TMZ D.C. bureau launched with three reporters; with characteristic snark, the announcement noted that congresspeople were returning to work not on Monday but Tuesday: “gotta make sure they get the full two weeks off, right?”
Is TMZ’s political heel turn, then, a net good? A keen observer may be loath to make that claim. TMZ is owned by the Murdoch family, whose tense albeit reciprocal relationship with Trump raises skepticism that the network can truly bring a MAGA-dominated government—one that’s continuously stripping away checks and balances—to task. Then there’s the knottiness of TMZ itself. Paying sources for information is wildly unethical for a media organization. The N.F.L. player Robert Jones, the subject of a TMZ story, sued the outlet for defamation in 2015; TMZ issued a retraction in the piece. Past employees have said that working under Levin is nightmarish; one former colleague of Levin’s filed a gender discrimination complaint against the organization in 2020. (Representatives for TMZ called the claims “inaccurate” in a statement to the Times, and said that the employee had been fired for other reasons.) Another employee spoke with The New Yorker for the 2016 story while wearing a disguise, worried about retribution.
Still, scrolling through TMZ’s posts of congresspeople instills a strange rush of Schadenfreude. As a cost-of-living crisis surges, these politicians look foolish and out of touch in their vacation getups, even more so when they try to explain themselves. Wolf, the T.S.A. employee, in her interview with TMZ, noted that she and her colleagues have been pooling together their scant resources to help one another, organizing food drives and collecting gift cards while calling their respective representatives about their struggles to scrape by. “Even [with] all the different calls and the interviews that we’re doing, it doesn’t seem to bother these people who are making this decision on our lives,” she said.
When appealing to a congressional answering machine fails, perhaps public embarrassment is the most effective lever to pull. If the tabloid keeps applying this sort of pressure to politicians, one can only hope that these shaming campaigns could effectively prevent Congress from future complacency—even if only to insure that they’re never in TMZ’s crosshairs again. ♦