A Newsroom That Doesn’t Need News
It is 6:30 in the morning, and a stubborn mist is hanging low over the Hollywood Hills. This is when TMZ punches in and goes to work making a television show that is beamed out five nights a week to the rest of us, mining our culture’s need to know every single little thing about celebrities.
Syndicated by Fox Broadcasting for the past three years, TMZ the show is recorded in the newsroom of TMZ the Web site, situated on Sunset Boulevard a block from the Chateau Marmont. It is an aggressive purveyor of celebrity news that has been known to uncover (or pay for) scoops that open the kimono on the world of Hollywood. But unlike Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight, TMZ lets viewers in on the joke. Five days a week, its reporters show up at work and the television lights come on above them and five cameras roam overhead as they discuss the “news” of the day. The newsroom is alive and buzzing about — well, let’s face it, nothing very important. No one pretends that they are covering the war in Afghanistan or the federal debt ceiling. They are covering show business, with an emphasis on the “show.” It is a pleasure to watch, and a very guilty one at that. But it is also a daily indictment of our outsize fascination with celebrities. We are in on the joke, but we are implicated by it as well.