For years, Harvey Levin has been America’s high priest of low spectacle. His tabloid news operation, TMZ, has camera crews in Hollywood forever lurking for celebrity DUIs, reality-show divorces, and shirtless indiscretions on boats. Yet, in a country where politics increasingly resembles a Bravo show moderated by C-SPAN, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the gossipmongers packed up and left Los Angeles for the nation’s capital.

This week, TMZ launched “TMZ DC”, deploying three producers to work the Hill full-time. It coincides with the return of Congress from a two-week spring recess, which TMZ had already been covering. The network had previously caught Ted Cruz in Fort Lauderdale and Lindsey Graham gripping a “bubble wand” in Disney World while a government shutdown loomed.

Its first dispatch from DC involved a TMZ reporter asking Cruz whether he was on Team Pope or Team Trump — a reference to the President’s ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV, whom the President had accused of being “weak on crime”. Cruz replied that he was “quite confident both the Pope and the President can speak for themselves”. That exchange was silly, but clarifying. TMZ won’t be filing 4,000-word investigations into regulatory capture, or spending 18 months tracing the arcane financial dealings of a Pentagon contractor. It will be prowling the Capitol with gotcha questions, microphone in hand, looking for juicy soundbites and politicians squirming on camera.

This, of course, is far from ideal. The TMZ format is built for humiliation, the sourcing is often mercenary, and the whole apparatus exists in journalism somewhere on the ethical spectrum between a pawn shop and a payday lender. But consider the tainted water we swim in. The line between entertainment and governance is blurrier than ever. The current president is a tabloid native who has been gossip-column fodder since the Eighties. Congress seems to be following suit with a litany of embarrassing personal scandals and professional corruption; Axios even noted this week that lawmakers were reaching “a breaking point” in terms of ethics violations.

Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell’s political collapse has become the sort of lurid, fast-mutating scandal that seems custom-built for the Hollywood-to-Washington tabloid age. His saga has included multiple sexual misconduct allegations, a House Ethics probe, and his resignation from Congress all breaking in a blur. Meanwhile, reports about Kristi Noem’s husband’s alleged online “bimbofication” fetish have supplied the kind of grotesque side-plot that makes Washington look less like the seat of empire than a dying streaming platform trying to goose engagement with stranger and sadder content.

What’s left to document it all? Local newspapers are gone or on the way out, and TV continues to dumb itself down. National outlets have been bought and gutted, or chased into an access-journalism model that makes them constitutionally unable to embarrass the people they cover. The Washington press corps spent years whiffing on Jeffrey Epstein while he hosted the capital’s most powerful figures at his properties.

Meanwhile, the collapse of traditional Hollywood and the old infotainment monoculture means TMZ desperately needs new material, and Washington is now ripe with possibilities. This is not the accountability journalism that a healthy republic deserves. It should have robust metro desks, aggressive investigative teams, and enough reporters on the beat to make every congressman at a committee hearing feel mildly spooked. But what we have is a gaudy, collapsing carnival in which the ringmasters are often crooks, the audience is half-distracted, and the traditional watchdogs work as news “influencers”.

Into that breach rolls TMZ, here to treat senators’ trysts and misstatements like Mel Gibson’s DUI meltdown and Ray Rice’s elevator. TMZ is not the hero America needs right now, but it might be exactly the hero the country deserves.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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