TMZ Is Evil and Should Rot in Hell

The passing of singer Liam Payne, best known for his work in the boy band One Direction, has brought with it a barrage of complicated emotions. Aged only 31, Payne had dealt with the dangers of fame from a very young age and often talked candidly of the impact it had on his mental health. He also had an alleged history of abusing women, with one of his exes opening up on the brutal treatment she received at his hand. The legacy of this band and its myriad social and cultural threads is something that will take a long time to disentangle. Frankly, it’s not something I personally feel qualified to delve into. Death carries with it such a weight that no one person can withstand its crushing force. Mourning is personal, a matter made more treacherous when a celebrity is involved. The way most of us found out about Payne’s death is a testament to the rotten industrial complex around fame and death, and it’s a form of pure unfettered evil that truly boils the blood.

TMZ is never knowingly respectful. The infamous gossip site made its name from confrontational and mean-spirited tactics that openly viewed famous people from A-List to Z as acceptable targets for scorn. For as long as the site has existed, it has faced criticism for its misogyny, story-gathering tactics, and total lack of empathy. This is no surprise given that the company is run by a sexist Trump supporter who fostered a workplace so misogynistic, racist, and generally hostile that dozens of former employees spoke out to the media about it. They are notorious for not only reporting on celebrities’ deaths before any other more reputable publication but doing so ahead of the deceased’s family and friends being informed. So, it wasn’t a surprise to see them do this with Payne. It still proved to be a gut-churning shock that they did so by publishing semi-obscured photographs of Payne’s corpse.

This is, depressingly, not new for TMZ. When Linkin Park lead vocalist Chester Bennington died by suicide in July 2017, TMZ reported in disturbing detail previous attempts Bennington had made on his own life, information that had been redacted from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s report. They reported intimate details on the suicide of DJ Avicii, too. Both stories went against the guidelines offered on how to report accurately and safely on suicide. In 2020, TMZ reported on the death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter long before his family had been notified. They also leaked photos of the crash site. Last year, they were the first to report on the death of Matthew Perry. Two days after Perry’s death, Eddie Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang, recalled his own TMZ experience following his dad’s death, tweeting, ‘They paid off people in the hospital when my father passed. Couldn’t even f**king grieve for 20 minutes.’

TMZ, which is owned by Fox, has a wide network of informants whom they pay handsomely for access to these stories. They’re willing to pay far more than other publications, as noted by the $250,000 payday someone received when they sold that elevator footage of Solange, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z. They pay off law clerks, waiters, valets, assistants, even cops. The Hollywood Reporter detailed how law enforcement ‘sources’ informed TMZ of Perry’s death. A former TMZ staffer even claimed that the local police were ‘extremely closely tied’ to the site and that a ‘handful’ of cops were responsible for many of their biggest tips. In 2019, the LAPD posted pictures on social media of a swag bag they’d received from the site. A law enforcement officer tipped off TMZ to Kobe Bryant’s death. His widow Vanessa then had to sue the county after some of those officers shared graphic photos of her husband and daughter’s remains from the crash. Nobody is surprised to find out that the LAPD is corrupt to the core but it’s still astonishing to hear that some people see a corpse and think of how much money they can make from it.

Of course, TMZ isn’t alone in this ghoulish line of work. When River Phoenix died, a photographer broke into the funeral home where his body was being kept to take pictures of him in his casket. Many newspapers and magazines put a dying Michael Jackson, strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance, on their front pages. A photographer once admitted to Prince Harry that the reason people followed him everywhere was that there was a chance they’d be the one to take the final photograph of him alive, and it would make them a lot of money. There is an evident demand for this level of craven coverage. Humans are an inherently curious species, to the point of morbidity. If the public wants it, give it to them, right? As they said in the forever prescient Nightcrawler, if it bleeds, it leads.

TMZ pretends that what it does has journalistic weight, that these are topics of immense public interest. We have to tell everyone that Liam Payne died before his own family found out because the public wants to know. We have to show pictures of his dead body because people want it. Their excuses have always been flimsy, even non-existent, and yet they keep going. It’s not illegal after all, right? Biblical sins, but not crimes.

I reject this and so do the majority of people. There was no reason on this decreasingly green earth for TMZ to pay off someone to get those photographs, publish them, and brag about their ‘exclusive’ story. There had to have been plenty of people in that ‘newsroom’ to discuss how this story would be written. They had to decide to use those photos, and someone clearly made the choice to only use a couple of them. I sadly doubt that anyone ever suggested not sharing them. They eventually deleted the pictures but that means nothing. Those pics are out there now, forever part of an internet that is written in ink, not pencil. I wonder if Payne’s seven-year-old son will have to look at them one day. I wonder what price the paparazzi will ask for if they try to get photos of the little boy at his dad’s funeral.

TMZ should rot in hell, and so should the Fox Corporation for continuing to financially aid and abet this kind of amoral exploitation. It’s not just Liam Payne. It’s an entire ecosystem of sleazy cops, failed journalists, starf**kers, and media monopolies that have turned abject human misery into #content. Sadly, I don’t think anything will change unless there’s a major legal shake-up or Rupert Murdoch is visited by three ghosts in the night. Until then, do the bare minimum of basic human decency and don’t share photographs of a dead man.