Mike Castiglione
A detailed report in the Feb. 22, 2016 issue of The New Yorker uncovers how celebrity gossip news site TMZ goes about obtaining its stories, as well as how much money has been paid to sources for front-page scoops.
According to the piece, TMZ paid $105,000 for the infamous surveillance footage of ex-Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice assaulting then-fiancee Janay Palmer inside an elevator at Atlantic City’s Revel Casino. One of the casino’s surveillance officers, sitting at a monitoring-room computer that infamous night, reviewed footage from a camera that faced the elevator and, using a cell phone, surreptitiously recorded the screen. The officer then called TMZ.
While it’s hardly shocking that backdoor bribes take place for the kinds of scoops TMZ obtains, one particularly notable revelation details how founder Harvey Levin blackmailed Justin Bieber in 2011 in exchange for not running a video of the pop star using the N-word and other racial slurs. Former TMZ production associate Justin Kaplan said he was given an envelope containing a check for about $80,000 with instructions to meet a woman in Las Vegas and exchange the envelope for a laptop and a disk. That afternoon, Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, had a phone conversation with Levin, who then decided not to run the story. After that conversation, numerous flattering Bieber-related exclusives appeared on the site, which was in stark contrast to the antagonistic Bieber coverage in the months before TMZ obtained the video.
Indeed, the site has built a deep network of sources, including entertainment lawyers, reality-television stars, adult-film brokers, and court officials, allowing Levin to knock down the walls that guard celebrity life. (He declined repeated requests for an interview.) TMZ has paid at least one mole inside B.L.S., a limousine service, to provide lists of celebrity customers, their planned routes, and the license-plate numbers of their vehicles. (In a 2015 e-mail, a TMZ employee asked colleagues if anyone had yet established a source at Uber.) Justin Kaplan, a former production associate at TMZ, recalls meeting a B.L.S. source—“a Hispanic gentleman”—at a gas station in Van Nuys, handing over an envelope filled with cash, and receiving in return a client list. The process had been so well honed, Kaplan told me, that “we barely said a word to each other.”
Other paid sources include lawyers, agents, and at least one employee of Delta Airlines that supplies TMZ with names and itineraries of celebrity passengers traveling through Los Angeles and New York. This massive network of informants has led to TMZ getting its hands on exclusive video footage such as the 2014 Solange Knowles-Jay Z elevator altercation, and of Michael Richards making racist comments during a comedy-club routine. Similarly, the site also got the scoop on the 2006 police records of Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and anti-Semitic rant, as well as the recorded phone call between former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his mistress that revealed Sterling as a bigot. In 2009, it was TMZ that broke the news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death after a first responder called in a tip upon arriving at Jackson’s house. Eighteen minutes after Jackson stopped breathing, TMZ published the story.
Everybody rats everybody else out,” Simon Cardoza, a former cameraman for the site, told me. “That’s the beauty of TMZ.”
Here’s the irony of this piece.
The guy who wrote it, Nick, he actually gets his access because his father is connected in high level government. If you look at the stories he has written you’ll see a trail of super high access stuff, and I know for a FACT he doesn’t do the legwork.
That said he does get great scoops.
No one should profit off private videos and information if they are acquired via theft. In that case everyone involved should be prosecuted.
This does keep some Hi profile people who are abusing people or acting obscured in-check when caught on public video. We see how they really act out of a controled setting. .