Today, Explained - TMZ Goes to Washington

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

The celebrity tabloid outlet is turning its attention to DC and supercharging a new era of political reporting. This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger, edited by Amina Al-Sadi with help from Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. TMZ Founder and Executive Producer Harvey Levin displayed at a TMZ launch party. Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you are watching this and you see a senator out and about somewhere, especially somewhere on vacation, send them to us. Send it to the TMZ tip line. TMZ founder Harvey Levin asked Americans answer. During the recent government shutdown, tipsters sent him photos of lawmakers doing anything but their jobs. Senator Robert Garcia in a casino, Ted Cruz at the airport, Lindsay Graham, Disney adulting with a bubble wand. Levin built his empire on celebrity gossip. He told CNN that it was an interview his outfit did with a TSA worker who wasn't getting her paycheck during the shutdown that radicalized him. It's not that the Democrats are at fault or the Republicans are at fault. They're all at fault.

So he set his sights on D.C., sending a team of three producers skittering around Capitol Hill and forcing the question, should we cover our politicians like celebrities that's coming up on today, explained from box. Do you think you would have got as far in politics if you weren't so handsome? Laura versus fruit flies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here.

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Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Today Explained. My name's Paula Mejia. I am a writer and editor living in Los Angeles, and I cover culture, cultural phenomena and arts for various magazines and other digital publications. All right, so what is TMZ? TMZ is a celebrity tabloid that is not print.

It's always been online. And they have a reputation for being very... aggressive in their tactics. Hi, do you hear the tragedy, Brad and Angie, are breaking up? Did you hear the Brad and Angelina are breaking up, Chris? I'll pray for him, man. That's too bad. Hey, Yalanda, is it true Zane struck you? They like to get in people's faces and ask them questions.

They will go up to a crime scene. They will publish photos that no one else will touch. TMZ has drawn massive outrage after the tabloid published pictures. of the late Liam Paine's body after the One Direction singer tragically fell to his death from the roof of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

They also have a controversial practice of paying sources for videos, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars depending on how juicy it is. And they've been around for a little over two decades, yeah, and just telling us all about the celebrity dirt for better and worse.

So, all right, so TMZ is what we might politely called tabloid news, are they considered accurate and reliable? Because you can cover all kinds of crazy stuff and still be factual and still be like a decent news source. How are they viewed on the spectrum of news outlets? There is quite a degree of skepticism when it comes to TMC, even though they do have a track record for breaking huge news. Like, they were the first outlet to report and confirm that Michael Jackson had died, for instance. Michael Jackson, the coroner's report has come out.

The cause of death is, and I'll read it for you, acute, propopal intoxication. So there's this kind of begrudging sense that they are able to get scoops very quickly, but there needs to be an additional layer of confirmation in order to be able to go forward with that news. Where did the impulse to cover Washington to cover politics come from? So Harvey grew up in the San Fernando Valley here in Los Angeles County, and his father owned a liquor store in the area. And when he was young, he saw that his father apparently was visited repeatedly by authorities who claimed that he was selling to underage patrons. And apparently these were sting operations that happened very frequently.

Meanwhile, Harvey saw that there was a huge discrepancy with how his father was being treated and then how celebrities who very much were not of drinking age were partying all the time in Hollywood and Beverly Hills and nothing seemed to happen to them. So he, by some accounts, seemed to always find that incredibly unfair. And there is a semblance of wanting to... expose, I think, what he perceives to be as unfair. And I think that Congress members going on vacation while they were at an impasse with this vote that would fund the Department of Homeland Security and thus would restore thousands of federal workers being paid for their jobs, that seemed to

hit a similar note for him. If you are watching this and you see a senator out and about somewhere, especially somewhere on vacation. Send them to us. Send it to the TMZ tip line. Okay, so is Harvey Levin's plan to cover D.C. the way he covers celebrities? And if so, like, what is it that he thinks people want out of this? Yeah, well, he's spoken about there's a kind of exasperation that people have with elected officials. and I think that he perhaps sees TMZ's mission as helping expose, well, what are they actually doing when they're not doing perhaps what we think they're supposed to be doing, right?

Last week, they officially got TMZ, D.C. off the ground by hiring a few reporters who are already hitting the ground running on Capitol Hill. Jacob here with TMZ. GMZ's in the house. TMZ's in the house. We're in D.C. How do you feel about it? I want to thank TMZ for holding members of Congress accountable. Seriously, you've been there three and a half days.

How's it been? I mean, where do I start? It's like I walk into a cafeteria and fuck up. Why don't you start there? Oh, my gosh. Already, the way that they're covering Washington is fascinating because it's very much serious news. For instance, they covered FBI director Cash Patel's feud with the Atlantic, where he sued the outlet over reporting that they did about him recently.

But then also they ran pictures of Hunter Biden at Coachella this past weekend. So it's very much personalities and personality-driven coverage for the most part. They asked RFK about the raccoon penis. Secretary, where did you do with the raccoon's dead penis? Where is it now? That they did. They not only asked him, what did you do with the raccoon penis? But they also asked him, what is your fascination with this roadkill?

And this is one of those things where it's. like, okay, yeah, I'm kind of glad they're asking that. Somebody had to ask them. Somebody had to ask them. And what I also find fascinating and something that I've been thinking about is, I think in some ways the world has caught up to TMZ's desire to cover subjects in this way, because they've always relied on video for, you know, for their scoops, especially for things that are huge news. kind of bombshell exclusive things. But they're very much using video now

as part of their DC coverage where they're essentially just walking up to RFK Jr. and saying, what's this about a raccoon penis? So it's... And in a world where more and more people are receiving their news in short form video format,

from influencers, they are very much playing into that. One wonders whether or not This is just schick, and TMZ is doing it for a couple weeks, a couple months, because it gets them a lot of attention, or whether or not there is a serious effort being made here to cover Capitol Hill. And I ask you this question in part because journalism is famously dying. People are famously abandoning, you know, bureaus all over the country, all over the world. And so this is, if this is a real investment, this is a real investment. So is this a real investment or is this just three guys running around acting nuts? I think this is a real investment. And I think part of that is not only because of their history in having a desire to have a footprint in Washington, but also because increasingly even legacy media outlets are very interested in the intersection of pop culture and politics. The Washington Post just had a brutal round of layoffs. that saw hundreds of people lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, they just listed a new job for a style politics reporter based in Washington, D.C., which is fascinating because it does not seem that unlike what TMZ is doing. To me, let me read you some of the description. The style section role will focus on illuminating the people, both famous and obscure, who animate the Capitol, From the social circuits, group chats, and digital ecosystems that define modern political life,

this beat captures the mood, the moments, and the meaning behind Washington's ever-shifting cast of characters. So by virtue of having cast of characters in a job listing, I think that that is already indicative of TMZ's effect on the media ecosystem in Washington. But I think they're also responding to something bigger happening in the media ecosystem where traditional outlets are hiring reporters to cover this intersection of pop culture, personality, power, and politicians. I think the Wall Street Journal had a very similar role, but had more to do with the finance sector as well, but very much interrogating the personalities and the kind of juiciness that happens over a round of martini's more so. than what happens in boardrooms. So TMZ, job creator. You said that, not me. She's Paula Mejia, writer and editor covering culture.

Coming up, hide in the bushes with me, how we started covering politicians like celebrities. Support for the show today comes from hymns. ED is more common than people realize and often easier to treat than you might think. With HIMS, they say you can connect online with a licensed provider to explore personalized treatment options, all handle discreetly and on your terms.

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Matt By is a national affairs columnist at Rolling Stone and the author of All the Truth is Out. That book traces the start of our obsession with the sorted details of politicians' personal lives back to a candidate named Gary Hart. Gary Hart in 1987 was the far and away leading Democratic contender for the presidential nomination. Gary Hart did it again today. The former Democratic senator from Colorado formally announced as a candidate for president. Last Sunday's Des Moines Register poll showed him with 65 percent of the Democratic vote. I was tempted to introduce the next first lady of the United States, but I'll simply say the best wife any candidate ever had, Lee Hart.

And it all went away in one week in what was the first sort of modern broadcast era sex scandal in politics. He was said to be having an affair with a woman who was not his wife and that he spent a night with her on a boat and then had her in his townhouse. He was followed by reporters from the Miami Herald, to sort of hidden the bushes in his street in his house. We were just going to watch the townhouse until I would actually have the chance to see Senator Hart. And at that point, talk with him. And followed him, accosted him in an alley. And I walk up to him and I say, excuse me, Senator Hart.

My name's Jim McGee. I'm a reporter from the Miami Herald. And I'd like to talk to you. It all made for great drama and his political ambitions in that moment imploded. And his political career never really remotely recovered. I've made some mistakes. I've said so. I said I would because I'm human. And I did. Maybe big mistakes, but not bad mistakes. What was new here was that rather than having it be discovered, either in the commission of a crime or by some kind of disclosure, reporters went out and searched for evidence of extramarital affairs on Gary Hart's part. And the press really decided in that moment that it was both relevant and essential to know.

whether he had been faithful to his wife or not. And Hart, who grew up in an era of very different rules, and who knew most of these reporters quite well, well enough to have dinner or drinks with them, and who was and is, a very private Western kind of personality and sort of in that sense, maybe the Dick Cheney mold, basically said this is none of your business. And that was not considered a suitable,

answer then or now. He never elaborated, including to me. I wrote an entire book about it. And I think, you know, the thing that resonates about Hart and the reason I revisited it and the reason I think it still holds some fascination among people who lived through that moment in 1987 is that he was not an ordinary senator or presidential candidate. He was a very brilliant politician of his day who was very forward-looking. A lot of his insight and agenda would become part of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats agenda very soon afterward. I also propose some massive overhauls of our income tax system to shelter those at the bottom against the ravages both of inflation and the tax, unfair tax system we have.

Cut taxes for the middle class and not the wealthy. We shouldn't cut education or Medicare just to make room for a tax cut for people who don't really need it. His departure from American politics was not just, I would argue, a sort of changer of the paradigms of what we consider private and personal space, but it had a ripple effect on everything that came later, that certainly it makes it fair to wonder where the country would be had it not happened. The rules didn't change because Hart was, you know, as you know, a different kind of politician or because he changed the rules.

The rules changed because they were changing, and Gary Hart just kind of walked into it. There was a lot happening in that moment. You were right at the birth of satellite technology and 24-hour, what would become the 24-hour news cycles. One of the things we're really excited about is our ability to use satellite coverage to feed from our Rome and our London bureaus and to feed from various points where stories are breaking in the world

and bring the material right here into Atlanta where we'll put it on the air as fast as we can. So suddenly it was possible to go live from anywhere, which had a real impact on what was considered news and what wasn't, you know, what would keep people in their seats. You also had this new generation of journalists who were just then coming on to the campaign buses and planes who had been sort of inspired into the business

by the example of Woodward and Bernstein, you know, 10 to 15 years earlier, who aspired to be Watergate-style journalists. And that meant not just taking people down in a shallow way, not just looking for scandal, but really protecting the American voter from failures and lapses in character, which was something I think they thought the American media of the previous generation had failed to do.

How did he react once he was caught? Defiantly. Ah. Defiantly. He felt it was no one's business. You know, he refused to answer questions about it. He tried to move on. I believe I would have been a successful candidate. And I know I could have been a very good president, particularly for these times.

But apparently now we'll never know. Hart would tell you that he got out of the race, not because he was no. longer a tenable candidate, but because it was impossible to speak to voters. It had become such a, politics had never seen a sort of tabloid press scrum like that before, because suddenly it wasn't just the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times and the Washington Post on the campaign trail. It was at that time of what was TMZ, right? It was People Magazine, and it was, you know, the brand new current affair and all these kinds of things. And so he withdraws from the race after a week, And he gives a speech that I think, particularly given the moment we're at now,

is the most important, forgotten speech in American political history. We're all going to be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve. Some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important. And I've come back very often in my writing over the year since I did that book to this phrase of the leaders, I tremble for my country when I think we may get the leaders we deserve, because I do think, in a sense, as a country, that's what's happened. We have created a political process that rewards shamelessness and dishonesty and exhibitionism and entertainment. And lo and behold, we have gotten a president now twice, who is shameless and exhibitionist and attention-seeking and an entertainer at heart.

And those two things are not coincidental. I take your point that X leads to Y leads to Z and we end up where we are. But some of the scandals that have been uncovered, they're not just cheating scandals, right? They're not just somebody makes a bad decision. Some of them are like serious crimes, sex crimes. Is the tabloidification of political journalism also a good thing? No, well, that's one of the best questions. You can, I mean, I've heard it's an.

Excellent. That's an excellent question. Very well put. Yes. Not all scandal coverage, not all tabloids coverage is worthless. right? It's not like we just don't care about anything you do in private. But, you know, I do not agree with those who would say, you know, well, the president's going to have an affair, you know, we should know about it. You have to be accountable for that, right? There are a lot of journalists, most journalists who covered Gary Hart, if they're still around today, we'll tell you, you know, he kind of got what he deserved. And okay, and my answer to that has always been well. I guess we're going to have to go back in history. Let's build a time machine. We're going to have to get rid of FDR, and we're going to have to get rid of Lyndon Johnson, and we're going to have to have to get rid of John Kennedy, and I guess we can just figure out another way through the Great Depression and the Second World War and the Cold War because none of these guys deserve to be president. We are not morality police, and some things are relevant and some things aren't. And my sympathy with Gary Hart is he was pleading in that moment not for complete innocence, not that he shouldn't have to be accountable. He was essentially saying some things are relevant and some things are not.

And no one has ever made a case with any persuasiveness whatsoever that anything Gary Hart did in that moment was relevant to the governance of the United States. Let me ask you a bit more about relevance. So we are used to ignoring lawmakers, other than the sort of bombastic ones who tend to draw a lot of attention, a lot of headlines. But then recently, you know, Congress takes a recess. The government shut down. And TMZ is chasing Lindsay Graham around.

Disney World. And what I saw from people who are not journalists is it hit different. There was this satisfied reaction like maybe we should be paying attention to what Congress is up to. Maybe we should be a little bit more mad at them. Maybe somebody should be asking Lindsey Graham, what's the deal with the bubble wand? Do you put any stock in that? I saw a grown man having a lot of funny Disney which I have too. And look, I mean, this is a different subject. I think the undercurrent of the allegations of those photos was different, right? It was not just about a senator having fun while the Capitol was dysfunctional. It was about rumors about Senator Graham that a bubble wand seemed to be, seemed to reinforce in people's minds. Rumors about his sexuality. Yeah. I mean, I think the bubble

wand was very clearly a like, look at this. You know, there was an insinuation there that I think everybody understood. You know, I guess you could argue that. You could say, you know, Congress is dysfunctional. They're not doing their job. They're shut down. You know, you shouldn't be in Disney world enjoying yourself. And so it's fine to chase you around. I don't know what the relevance of that is. If you're at home, if you're at Disney World, I mean, I think politicians get to be people, right? We lost something as journalists and as a country when they decided they had to erect a wall between themselves and the media and the public because it was too risky to be people. So, you know, of all the things I really don't like about Donald Trump,

and I've been pretty clear that that's just about everything, I will give him credit for talking all the time to the media. Too much. He's accessible. He's actually out there. He wants to be. He needs to be seen. Needs to be heard.

I have lived through an era where I went from, you know, riding around in cars and buses and getting to know candidates who wanted to govern the country and having lunch with them. and socializing to an extent that I understood who they were to an era when it would be almost impossible to have that kind of proximity to leading politicians of the day. I mean, they basically are social media practitioners

who really just want to go around the media and in a sense not really talk to voters either. And that's, and you know, we created that climate. We have some responsibility for it. And I think if you're, you know, if you're chasing a politician around, you know, in Disney World because he seems to be having too good a time when the government's not perfect, I don't know how destructive that is. Matt By of Rolling Stone, the book is All the Truth is Out.

The movie based on the book is The Frontrunner. Kelly Wessinger produced today's show. Amina El Sadi and Jolie Myers edited. David Tatashore is our engineer, and Gabriel Dunatub checks the facts. I'm Noil King. It's today explained.