Tabloid Baby's 2007 Journalist of the Year

Our awards season moves forward with what's sure to be a controversial decision... not even Our Man Elli in Israel can claim the influence of a short, 57-year-old attorney who ought to know better, Tabloid Baby's 2007...

JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR
Harvey Levin

Time Magazine has their Vladimir Putin. We have Harvey Levin, the bronzed, buffed and boy-buffered figurehead and queen of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, the most noxious news operation on the Internet and its recent syndicated television spin-off, the whitewashed, inconsequential, soul-sucking, corrupt half hour of daily infotainment built around the phony “newsroom” interaction between Levin’s Mr. Chips and his stable of fawning young pretty boys who run off to do his bidding, which is getting in the faces of Hollywood folk as they go about their daily business, with little regard for consequence or perspective .

As our esteemed pal Ray Richmond at The Hollywood Reporter wrote in August on his essential Past Deadline site:

"TMZ is the Antichrist... toxic and tactless... classless... (an) attack-dog corner of cyberspace... backed by boatloads of AOL/Time Warner corporate cash... so unctuous, sleazy and extreme that it's singlehandedly slicing a dagger through whatever credibility entertainment journalism had remaining. It's ruining things for those who are at least fighting to retain a measure of taste and sensitivity, as boss Harvey Levin and his TMZ possess none."

Despite-- and because of-- his crimes, Harvey Levin deserves the title of Tabloid Baby’s Journalist of The Year, and not only because he’s given us so much to write about these past twelve months. Put it this way: who did more damage to entertainment reporting in 2007 than Harvey Levin? In 2007, he and his gutter operation did indeed wield that dagger and in the process almost singlehandedly transformed Hollywood entertainment reporting into a gutter-level street battle fueled by self-hatred, jealousy and anger, with no concern for what once determined greatness, excellence or fame, and in the process, overwhelming the fine reportage of Nikki Finke and Ray Richmond, while sending the Defamer crowd into hiding.

Some credit for Levin’s “rise” must be given to his former executive producer and BFF, Lisa Gregorish, who at the TelePictures mother show, Extra!, cultivated a brawny camp cult following on camera and behind the scenes and, before their Collins-Evans falling out, allowed Levin to branch off, actually establish an office in West Hollywood upstairs from a gym, and water his own crop of wide-eyed boytoys who are the real stars of a sordid series whose ostensible on-air personalities are a bunch of plug-uglies cut from Levin's pre-fab-makeover mold.

Stripped of any moral compass, fueled by crude, vulgar, witless, often disgusting writing, with no regard for fairplay, history, truth, justice or the American way, the cowardly TMZ operation is the apotheosis of Bush-era Hollywood, run as a division by corporate monoliths and concerned only with the bottom line. And as TMZ distracts America from important issues (like war, the writers strike, studio failures and television's ideas crisis) with its frenzied pursuit of unstable young women, it has the lazy “mainstream” news media to thank for welcoming it as a legitimate news source despite its obvious deceptions and lies about its tactics and practices (hey, Harvey's even got the New York Times on his side!).

Harvey, meanwhile, can thank his lucky stars that in 2007, no one was killed in TMZ’s irresponsible line of duty. Unless, of course, you count David Hans Schmidt, the celebrity porn broker who was TMZ.com’s partner in porn-pushing, until his mysterious “suicide” a couple of weeks after TMZ TV’s premiere.

We're not through yet. Stay tuned for Tabloid Baby's 2007 Person of The Year...

Playboy enlists Tabloid Baby against TMZ & Levin

Don't think that our watchdog posts about corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin go unnoticed. A few months ago, the Tabloid Baby office was contacted by an editor from Playboy magazine, asking editor Burt Kearns to submit a letter to the editor in response to the magazine's "20 Questions for Harvey Levin" feature in its June issue.

Burt sent along the requested response to Harvey's less-than-forthright answers in his Playboy Q&A (nattering about journalism, "good stories," "trust" and other vomit-inducing lies through his capped teeth) and, after several rounds with Playboy attorneys and space limitation edits, a "letter to the editor" appears in the September issue that should be on the stands any day now.

Here it is, on page 16:

Is Levin serious? TMZ and its inconsequential, whitewashed TV sister are built on conglomerate financing from Time Warner, the promotion of coprophiliac "celebrity" sex videos, the perversion of justice through checkbook journalism, the provocation of artists by felons and rent boys with video cameras, the elevation of shameless celebutards and a creepy obsession with Matthew McConaughey's bare chest. TMZ is a tabloid without a moral compass; it's not doing anything that wasn't done better 15 years ago during the golden age of tabloid television.
Burt Kearns
Los Angeles, California
Kearns, former managing editor of A Current Affair and Hard Copy, edits tabloidbaby.com.

Ray Richmond, the television columnist known as the conscience of the industry (and proprietor of the Past Deadline website), also was asked, and contributed an editorial response that appeared in a somewhat truncated form:

It's funny you would ask Harvey Levin, of all people, about journalistic ethics. I'd respect Levin a little more if he didn't try to defend the indefensible. Instead, he has the gall to claim his gossip site, TMZ, turned down a video of a drunken David Hasselhoff taken by Hasselhoff's daughter, because it "was not meant for the public," while asserting that Alec Baldwin's leaked phone message to his 11-year-old daughter somehow is our business, Sleaze merchants like Levin attempt to capture the famous on their worst day-- and if they can't, they manufacture a worst day for them.
Ray Richmond
Los Angeles California
Richmond, a columnist at The Hollywood Reporter, runs pastdeadline.com.

Though Harvey and his smarmy, subliterate boycrew are more likely to read Blueboy than Playboy (not that there's anything wrong with that), they'll get these messages loud and clear.

Check out page 16 at the newsstand.

Hollywood outrage as Harvey Levin and TMZ use Carradine hanging photo as an excuse to give kids a step-by-step manual to auto-erotic asphyxiation

We've got to hand it to the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, trumpeting that they're taking some kind of high road by not re-posting today's Thai newspaper photo that allegedly shows David Carradine's naked dead body hanging in the closet of his hotel room, while publishing in its stead something a thousand times more reprehensible, sick and perverted:

An obviously first-hand, step-by-step guide
to auto-erotic asphyxiation!

Who does Harvey Levin think he's fooling? With their marketing and promotion of "celebrity" sex videos featuring scatology and urination to their Hollywood-hating confrontational tactics, TMZ's shaved bronzed midget frontman and his creepy harem of adoring rentboys have been trying for years to inject their amoral, sleazy and septic practices into the mainstream pop culture.

This latest assault can't be blamed on the weekend crew. While the Saturday-Sunday TMZ benchwarmers have been historically and often hysterically clueless on the tabloid journalism and propriety fronts, but though they manage to misspell Carradine's name in one of today's posts (above), it's obvious that it wasn't an hourly-wage mook but an elder veteran of bizarre, perverted sex practices who came to work on a weekend to drool over the Carradine snuff photo and give it his own self-abusive analysis:

"...if this is truly a case of auto-erotica, typically people who do this will put a cloth or something between the neck and the skin to avoid marks that would be difficult to explain. There's a picture that was published in a Thai newspaper showing the body hanging. We will not publish it, but we do not see evidence of anything between the neck and rope...

"...if this is truly a case of auto-erotica, generally there would be a magazine, video or something of a sexual nature within eyeshot to stimulate arousal...

"Also -- the notion behind auto-erotica is that oxygen is restricted to heighten orgasm, but the subject generally has a ladder, stool or something like it to restore oxygen..."

Thanks for the helpful tips, Harvey. You might even convince a lonely teenager to give it a try-- especially after you added a little more spice later in the day:

"...the new sharper image also reveals what appears to be fishnet stockings covering the body. You can also see red women's lingerie on the bed."

These outrageous, sick and attention-grabbing posts likely were concocted after the corporate overlords at Time Warner and AOL ordered that the Carradine photo not be posted, and come at a time when, through its own lack of judgment and morality, and faced with paid competition, TMZ has become increasingly irrelevant. Last week, the newcomer Hollywood Rumor Rat posted:

"It seems Radar Online is really jamming things up for... TMZ.com... For its first couple of years as an online entity, TMZ had a lock on gossipy exclusives... These days, TMZ seems to have been relegated to reporting items generated by public relations press releases...

"If TMZ doesn't step things up, it could soon disappear from the Hollywood radar."

The entrance of the National Enquirer's paid professional tabloid team under the cloak of RadarOnline has pulled TMZ's pants down to its spray-tanned ankles and exposed its shaved, bronzed shortcomings. TV attorney Harvey Levin can't compete with an Enquirer team schooled in the all-important nuances that are so important to the tabloid trade, like recognizing heroes from villains. (Harvey Levin and TMZ chased, hounded and mocked the disturbed woman who gave birth to eight children. RadarOnline gave her a video journal.)

TMZ's packs of street trade thugs, hanging outside hotspots with home video cameras to taunt celebrities, are no longer seen as a threats, but laughed at as clueless morons paid pennies to risk arrest. Someone up above even put a stop to the website's heartless puerile jokes about celebrity deaths. TMZ's irrelevance is the main reason we've stopped writing about them.

Look at TMZ today: Afraid to run police evidence photos, falling back on their private games.

Looks like TMZ is, well, hanging itself!

Harvey Levin & TMZ feast on Jimi Hendrix's dick

Don't let anyone try and tell you that the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com has cleaned up its act when it comes to promoting pornographic videotapes-- not now that shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin and his band of boy followers have come off a sex tape-shilling hiatus with their most graphic and disgusting display since the days of their "Screech Saved By The Smell" outrage.

Jimi Hendrix Sex Tape!!! Gives Good Headband

is accompanied by a promotional video that's not only NSFW and over the top, but which features an explicit-to-the-vein plaster cast of the guitar god's member and the word "dick" thrown around more often than it is during TMZ internship interviews.

The sales tape posted on the TMZ site is branded with a website URL, so that, just as in the old days, viewers can click in and buy a copy of the long-rumoured but somehow-suspect Jimi Hendrix sex tape.   And just like in those days when TMZ got its first multi-million page views through an unholy union with late porn merchant David Hans Schmidt, the same old questions arise:

Does Harvey Levin get a cut of the X-rated sales? Does AOL? Time Warner? Are any of the proceeds used to finance TMZ's sister operation, CNN? Is anyone at TMZ cashing on the porn it pushes?

In any case, while we don't expect the "mainstream" media to go after a concern as powerful and noxious as TMX, this latest display stands well as another example of how out of touch the TMZ team is with American values beyond the border of West Hollywood border. And it's definitely one that the wives and golfing buddies of TMZ's corporate overlords at AOL and Time-Warner should get a gander at.

It's almost funny. This Hendrix sex tape story has been reported by media around the world. And as any good tabloid reporter knows, any story can be told to any audience with the right words, humour and tone. But for all its financing and powerful corporate push, only TMZ, led by Harvey Levin and his amoral, immoral team of subliterate boytoys, leaves a... ahem... bad taste in the mouth.

But who cares, right?

Upstart gossip site notices how TMZ bows to our criticism of its dangerous, offensive auto-asphyxiation primer

In one of our recent mentions of the latest offense perpetrated by the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its shaved bronzed midget frontman, the television attorney and tabloid pretender Harvey Levin, we acknowledged frisky newcomer Hollywood Rumor Rat, and today Rumor Rat responded in kind:

"There’s a behind the scenes battle a-brewing in the online world of tabloid journalism. The proprietors of www.tabloidbaby.com are going after TMZ with a vengeance over recent reports regarding the untimely death of actor David Carradine. Yesterday, Tabloid Baby took a few jabs at TMZ honcho Harvey Levin ('the shaved bronze midget,' as TB refers to him) and his staff, over their 'obviously first-hand step-by-step guide to auto-erotic asphyxiation.' Ouch! That was yesterday – Sunday. Today – by sheer coincidence, we’re certain – TMZ is now attributing it’s how-to guide to a 'scientific expert.'

"Surely nobody on the TMZ staff would have knowledge of the masturbatory pleasures of depriving one’s self of oxygen at just the right moment, right? The Big Cheese is certain that giant TMZ would like to make it seem as though it's brushing off the barbs of a pesky little website.

"Fact is, the man who brings us Tabloid Baby is one of the brains behind modern tabloid journalism. You can bet that on some level, Harvey Levin is taking all of his criticisms very seriously."

Huzzahs to Rumor Rat. A few clarifications:

* This is no war. TabloidBaby.com is world-renown as the premier critic of TMZ.

* TMZ has never brushed off any of our barbs, and its corporate overlords have responded to each of our criticisms, as they did in the case of the Carradine offense.

* Shaved bronzed midget TMZ frontman Harvey Levin takes ALL of our criticisms very seriously, for he is our dog.

Meet Harvey Levin's TMZ TV costars

Get a load of these mugs!

These are the faces of the TMZ TV series. As expected, and as we reported, TMZ editor, former local TV news reporter, host search committee leader and TV show "executive producer" Harvey Levin has managed to insert himself into the on-air mix as "Main on-air personality." He's done a clever job by picking younger co-stars who are as plug-ugly as himself-- and with "newsy" backgrounds that distance the TV show from the sleazy corporate porn-pushing gossip site it will elevate.

But Ben Mankiewicz, Teresa Strasser and Katie Daryl, seen above, (along with "TMZ.com staffer" Michael Hundgen, whose work can be seen here) could also be trouble-- and not only because they're more suited to radio or cable than syndicated television. Harvey and the TMZ TV minds seem to be equating plain and non-flashy appearances with real tabloid authority. This group might look the part, but whether they bring any tabloid legitimacy to the table is another story altogether. In the end, there's no Arthel Neville, no Doug Bruckner-- no one who knows the territory, only younger faces that match the decor.

Ben's a leftie with intellectual pretensions, Teresa's an Adam Carolla strawlady with smartypants showbiz pretensions, and Katie-- well, we don't know who the hell Katie is, except they're pushing her role on an MTV politics special.

Ben is the kid brother of NBC Dateline's tabloid reporter Josh Mankiewicz, and the host of a liberal morning talk radio show on Air America.

He also hosts a cartoon show on the Turner Classic Movies channel-- and comes from a line of Hollywood royalty, being the grandson of famed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and great-nephew of screenwriter, producer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. How does the family of writers react to TMZ.com's cheap, smarmy way with words?

Teresa is one of the girls from the Jimmy Kimmel camp, inserted into the execrable Carolla radio show as the sexless "Jewish" (their word) newsreader who's rebelled by generating sparks with cohost and show stealer Danny Bonaduce. She soaks in the lunkhead lowbrow humour that TMZ and Carolla's show share, but fancies herself a wit.

And Katie (below)? Well, she looks like Harvey's idea of the sexy blonde. Get the 13-week clock ready.


(Meanwhile, Page Six reports that "after the co-executive producer Bryn Friedman was canned last week, rumors started swirling that the start-up program could be in trouble. 'Bryn was the scapegoat of a riff between the executive producers, Harvey Levin and Jim Paratore,' our spy said. 'They've been fighting because there is no show and no set and the launch is just weeks away. 'But Levin told us, "I don't know what you're talking about - the set is the newsroom and I love Jim, he's like my brother! And while I'm on the show, there is an ensemble cast. It is different than a traditional magazine show."' As for Friedman? 'I like Bryn. I'm not going to discuss (firing her).' Friedman... has been in touch with celebrity lawyer Marty Singer..."

(Losing a "mainstream," "straight news" veteran like Friedman (we told you a few days ago about her misgivings) is a real blow for Harvey's quest for credibility. And his lies about the circumstances surrounding the show's troubled start-up don't bode well for expectations of candor and legitimacy for TMZ TV. )

TMZ's Harvey Levin is queried and probed and poses in heterosexual men's sex magazine

We'd assume there would be little chance of finding a Playboy magazine in the home of Harvey Levin, the shaved bronzed midget frontman of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television version. Of course, Harvey’s got his own bunny hutch in his West Hollywood office aerie, but Harvey’s bunnies have balls.

But now the old men’s mag, which has strained its back muscles dipping into the celebutard scene of late, is featuring the prominent appreciator of the male form (see: Matthew McConaughey) in the 20 Questions section of its June issue, which is out today and would make the angry jealous gossip queen the one man in America telling the truth when he claims to read Playboy for the articles.

Playboy’s publicists were kind enough to send us an advance copy, because “we know you have covered Harvey Levin of TMZ before.” Yes we have. Of the twenty questions, two provoke answers that are the most chilling, journalismwise. One is a sad fact that we’ve pointed out: that the “mainstream" news media lazily cite the subliterate celebbaiters as a legitimate news source:

"When we started, two and a half years ago, there was a feeling that nobody except National Enquirer covered this material, and the national media turned up their nose at us. Now you're in trouble if you don't cover it. We play a little game in our office sometimes when we post a big story. We bet on how soon it will take CNN to flash 'TMZ is reporting...' across the bottom of the screen. Often it's a matter of seconds.”

The other worry is where Harvey is next setting his sights:

"I see huge opportunities in covering politics in a way that would be interesting and fun for people. People say you can't make politicians as interesting as Hollywood celebrities, because they're not as good-looking, not as well-known, not as entertaining. I totally disagree. These are some of the most interesting people in the country, and they haven't been covered that way before."

By the way, a reader recently asked about those male torsos featured on this and some of our other recent TMZ-related posts: they’re not of Harvey (Playboy sent us a clothed shot from the magazine, but wanted us to sign a release form to post it), but the corporate-porn-pushing equivalent of the old TV news “headshot.” These are Harvey’s on-air toyboys, the ones who point home video cameras in people’s faces and then report to Harvey about the confrontations on the TMZ TV show. Photographs like these are posted by the boys themselves on their MySpace and other public websites in order to promote their careers and themselves.

We’ll leave it to you to put faces to the bodies. And to send us more.

TMZ's crappy clip show canceled

Beyond Twisted, the clip show brought to you by the subliterate scumbags at the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, has gotten the axe only three mind-numbing weeks into its eight week "trial run" by Warner Bros. and Fox television stations.

The cancellation is of little surprise and surely pales beside the original decision by cash-tight syndication suits to allow TMZ's shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin to enter the genre of concise, well-written and often dramatic reality clips, based on his middling success with his sewer site's whitewashed inconsequential syndicated sister.

Giving Harvey Levin and his classless crew of corner boys a daily show that requires subtle writing skills and topnotch production values is akin to giving Chevy Chase (or Sharon Osbourne or Magic Johnson or Howie Mandel or...) a talk show.

Bad enough the show's title sounds like it was spit out by a 13-year-old. One would think hubristic hairless Harvey's corporate overlords would have gotten the picture when he originally pitched the putrid project under the title, "WTF?" (that's the type of wit and style that circulates in his circles). While the show's website has already been purged from the Internet, the official promotional material still refers to the program's content as "funny and gross"-- good examples of the crude, sleazy and childish worldview and methods of a Fagin and his team of street thugs who've soiled the celebrity scene with foul intrusive reports like the one yesterday in which directional microphones were used to record private conversations between sad Lindsay Lohan and her girlfriend, behind a closed gate, in a supposedly exclusive residential neighborhood, at five o' clock in the morning.


Does one's dedication to the arts and entertaining the masses negate all expectations of privacy even while inside one's wall- and hedge-protected home? Has Harvey Levin paid off everyone in the Sheriff's and police departments?

Yet, TMZ spreads like a virus and our criticism goes unnoticed--

NO, IT DOESN'T!


A tip of the Tabloid Baby hat to the scrappy, funny, mysterious and never cheesy newcomer to the celebrity news and gossip scene, Hollywood's Rumor Rat. The anonymous Big Cheese and his rat pack have come out of their hole, nibbling away at bigs like Perez Hilton and joining us in targeting offenders like the Levin gang. Rat has not only proven to have excellent sources inside every syndicated infotainment operation (including Harvey's pit) in town, but manages to come up with scoops that may be overlooked because they hit a week or two before anyone else catches up.

Case in point: the Beyond Twisted cancellation. Rumor Rat had the scoop last Wednesday.

Rumor Rat has the buzz and has generated speculation as to his identity. Once he upgrades his site to include individual story links and reader comments, the Rat is bound to nibble its way to the top.

TMZ TV: Goodbye, Mr. Levin

It opens with a dream sequence.

Harvey Levin is a buffed, bronzed, dyed and pumped Mr. Chips, presiding over a class of pretty young boys at a West Hollywood version of a British boarding school. As Harvey stands with a pastel marker to scrawl celebrity names on a wall of glass, the young pretties compete for his approval by pitching him gossip stories. There’s a beautiful Death in Venice twink with a mane of streaked blonde hair, straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Harvey fixes him with a smoldering, come-hither stare that has little to do with the story the boy is teasing...

And Monday's premiere of the televised version of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com was underway! Who’d have predicted that the nastiness, kink and coprophiliac sleaze of the website would be replaced by pure camp? While the website is a stinky cesspool, the TV show is a boys-only bubblebath—the television equivalent of that purple TeleTubby used by TMZ.com to mark the deaths of famous gays or conservatives.

But it was in the cards from the beginning. Aside from the queeny asides like "It's bewildering, Bitch!" (note to producers: a male co-host should not utter that line.), the frenetic, whiplash-inducing ride through rehashed video, movie clips, animated cut-outs and vaporous, wispy, dated stories, TMZ the TV show takes its cues— and replays many of the same stories-- from its mothership, Extra!, and the other infotainment shows that replaced storytelling and content with fast-paced fluff about ten years ago. Add the blurry TMZ.com video shot by its cut-rate kiddie harassment squad and the on-the-cheap graphics, and the show and look are a lot closer to the low-budget one-hour pop culture specials that clog and kill time on VH1 and the E! channel.

Harvey, with this Roy Cohn-meets-Barry Diller countenance, popped up throughout the first episode, but his putative co-hosts, all bent noses and too much pancake makeup, were hard to find. A dour Teresa Strasser, looking the worse for wear after months of battering by the execrable Adam Carolla on morning radio, literally got about three seconds of airtime near the end. Two of the pretty young boys had already appeared twice on the show before she and the other hired female made an appearance.

Boys, Boys, Boys

Harvey’s younger male counterpart, the left-leaning Hollywood scion Ben Mankiewicz, didn’t show up until Day 2, by which time someone in the hierarchy had demanded that executive producer Harvey add some females into his locker room opening. So two young women were hauled out to pretend to pitch Harvey stories. But the boy toy male model again returned for a cameo.
(Do we see a gossip item in the making?)

Ben was placed in the sequence to appear as if he was watching from the sidelines like a bemused Rafael Abramovitz. He followed up by pissing all over the TMZ concept by embarrassing the celebutard crowd Harvey has been elevating, with a “Jaywalking” segment meant to prove that they don’t know the year of the September 11th attacks.

Too bad that the 9/11 Q&A shtik has been done before, to greater effect, not only on Leno’s show, but on other television shows and more than once on YouTube (check out a version here that was posted in May). You're a copycat, bitch! Even so, it was a statement, a clear sign that Ben thinks he’s above the fray and that the clock is already ticking until the day he walks off the show in high dudgeon (we say it was in the cards from the day he was hired).

Gay code?

It was about six minutes into that second show that Harvey’s fetish object Matthew McConaughey finally made his first appearance in a shirtless paparazzi shot. Oddly, poor Teresa Strasser was made to read what was an apparently some kind of coded message signaling that McConaughey is gay:

“Adonis-chested Matthew McConaughey blew a fan…”

(long pause)

“...off last night…”

The line “Matthew McConaughey blew a fan” was definitely left hanging there, deliberately, long enough to get our attention-- and to have us think for a moment that he'd actually favored some lucky fan with oral gratification! Was that an in-joke among Harvey, Jim, Paul and the boys? Or did Teresa and Carolla's other boss, Jimmy Kimmel, give her the line reading?

Who cares? No one else noticed, apparently. And to be honest, we stopped there. After fast-forwarding through a lot of Episode 1, we didn’t even make it to the second quarter of Show 2, let alone Show 3. Everything we needed to know about TMZ the TV show was in that first 35 minutes or so. As it stands, the show is Harvey’s ego trip, and the gay meter is blowing… its top. Expect big changes ahead. Expect Ben to be gone. Expect a Rachel Dratch-Jane Krakowski-style female talent switch, and expect Harvey Levin to be shunted to the sidelines, Mike Walker-style, for his own good.

The stain of TMZ.com has spread indelibly across the Internet. TMZ the TV show is already irrelevant. Right now, it would fit in well at 11 pm on E! or the TV Guide channel and get that expected audience. But in the mainstream syndicated television market, it’s already time to count the little Harvey heads to cancellation.

Who will be Tabloid Baby's Journalist of The Year and Person of The Year for 2008?

When we give out our year-end honors, we wait for the end of the year. We don't write them up in November or agree on the finalists when there are still four weeks in the year to go and miss out on the most choice contenders, as happens with so many death roll calls (see The New York Times Magazine). So now, with mere hours left in 2008, we figure it's time to add up the votes from the Tabloid Baby staff, readers and pals and announce our people of the year.

To be honest, last year's Person of The Year and Journalist of The Year contained a tinge of journalistic cynicism amongst the optimism, but both turned out to be pretty good harbingers and influences for 2008.

Our Journalist of The Year for 2007 was Harvey Levin, the shaved bronzed midget frontman for the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its whitewashed syndicated sister. "Who did more damage to entertainment reporting in 2007 than Harvey Levin?," was the query we posed. "In 2007, he and his gutter operation did indeed wield that dagger and in the process almost singlehandedly transformed Hollywood entertainment reporting into a gutter-level street battle fueled by self-hatred, jealousy and anger, with no concern for what once determined greatness, excellence or fame."

The title we bestowed on Harvey led other news organizations to take a closer look. Even Playboy magazine asked our editor to weigh in on its Levin coverage. And hoist by its own mantard, TMZ.com the noxious website sank to the same irrelevancy as its camp, inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television version-- less a journalistic force than a distasteful obscene Internet embarrassment to its corporate overlords at AOL Time Warner.

People noticed.

Michael Lohan, our 2007 Person of The Year, lived up to the expectations we had a year ago when we wrote that we "look forward to new grand schemes and projects, more unexpected headlines." Paternity questions and fights with Lindsay's lesbian love aside, Michael has found fame in his own right, is headed to Sundance next month with more than one project and only this week launched his own website as he continues his quest to get out the "the truth."

Harvey Levin failed in his quest to kill tabloid. Thanks in part to Michael Lohan, Tabloid Lives.

So tonight, we announce

Tabloid Baby's 2008 Journalist of The Year

and

Tabloid Baby's 2008 Person of The Year.

Stay tuned...

"SHUT THIS THING DOWN, PLEASE!" Gawker Media joins our protest against filthy TMZ.com

"I can find nothing entertaining or redeeming
in any of the site's content.
It's all just base and poorly written
and arbitrarily amoral.
I'm just as complicit in the whole awful
celebrity-industrial complex as they are,
but good god let's try to have a little style
while we ruin people's lives, eh?"

--Gawker.com

For a while there, we thought we were shouting into the wind when it came to the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com.

Could we, old tabloid-loving, tabloid television pioneering hacks that we are, be the only ones who are really, physically repulsed by the coprophiliac power bottom filth they pinch out on an hourly basis? Are we the only ones who are appalled that the genre we helped create was taken over by the shaved bronzed midget Harvey Levin-- the guy we all laughed at back in the heyday (he was a butch little local news reporter at the time and did a lot of stupid things trying to imitate the trendsetting tabloid shows-- like almost getting the case against OJ Simpson thrown out of court).

For while, it seemed only that Ray Richmond of The Hollywood Report and Past Deadline site, was wise enough-- and in this town, brave enough --to stand up against the scumbags, going as far as to state, "TMZ is the AntiChrist."

But after our rantings against TMZ boys club's senselessly, needlessly cruel jokes about the death of poor Elliot Yamin's beloved mother, other good, smart Internet tabloid journos are joining the fight.

Nick Denton's Gawker.com is based in New York, but this afternoon they took our lead and hit Hollywood's festering pustule with a pop. Under the headline "THINGS I ACTUALLY HATE: TMZ will even make fun of your mother's death," Richard Lawson picks up the Yamin story, adding:

"Instead of simply saying "that was dumb, we're sorry," (TMZ) ran another post that included a poll. If 51% of readers said the line should go, they'd pull it. Almost 100,000 people voted and a resounding 78% wanted it gone. So, they got rid of the offending bit and continued on their merry way. Without ever issuing a measly apology. The woman died two days ago for chrissake. I'm all for an off-color joke, but a little human decency never hurt anyone..."

Then they were nice enough to credit and link to us.

And then, Gawker went even farther:

"You know what's funny about TMZ? No, I'm... uh, I'm actually asking. The site is so screechy and repugnant that I always have to click away before I can remember to look for anything remotely amusing. The way they eagerly roll around in pop shit and gleefully smear it everywhere, because it's so campy and naughty, reminds me of the dumb queens from high school and their haggish friends who would shriek and think they were hysterical because they said 'cum dumpster.' I can find nothing entertaining or redeeming in any of the site's content. It's all just base and poorly written and arbitrarily amoral. I'm just as complicit in the whole awful celebrity-industrial complex as they are, but good god let's try to have a little style while we ruin people's lives, eh? Shut this thing down, please. Oh, and the wretched TV show too. There is no reason to see and hear Harvey Levin and his army of smug little shits every goddamn day."

The item was even picked up up by Gawker's distracted Hollywood cousin, Defamer, which in the past year has kowtowed to the ugly power of Levin's gutter operation. Interesting that a few hours later, Defamer's new managing editor Mark Graham ran another item about TMZ, this one about an old clip, unearthed most recently a few months ago, that shows the decadent Harvey Levin in a more positive light, many years ago, as a student activist.

Did Defamer get a call? More likely, it's the big-budget PR firms hired by TMZ's benefactors, AOL and Time-Warner, earning their pay by controlling the spin, and changing the headline.

But not here, Harvey.

Harvey Levin gets a Woody, then exposes himself

Harvey Levin, the former local news legal analyst and street reporter turned flamboyant infotainment show reporter and legal analyst, has bitten the hand that feeds him in his new role running the “interactive” Hollywood website TMZ.com.

TMZ sends kids with video cameras to stand outside hotpots to provoke celebrities to go wild. The site made a stir when billionaire scumheir Brandon Davis went off on a filthy obscene tirade against Lindsay Lohan, while his companion Paris Hilton giggled like a moron. Now it’s seeking headlines, claiming the Woody Harrelson attacked one of its operatives.

But Harvey might regret his latest stunt, trying to milk publicity out of a confrontation with a Hollywood good guy— an adult who stumbled into the silliness. Because TMZ is no renegade Internet independent. It’s a cog in the corporate machine.

And it could be throwing a spanner into the works.

A few nights ago, one of TMZ’s kids with a camera managed to bait Harrelson as he stepped out of a Hollywood nightspot. The actor asked the kid to get the camera out of his face. The kid mouthed off, and while a second TMZ stalkerazzi recorded a wide shot of the scene, Woody allegedly broke the kid’s camera.

That’s showbiz (and that’s probably why the second cameraman was stationed to record the confrontation). From Sinatra to Sean Penn to Tommy Lee, the subject occasionally bites back.

Harvey the lawyer doesn't get it. He sent the kid to the Hollywood Police Station to file a police report. Then he had the kid go to the Cedars-Sinai emergency room and took nice photos taken of the bruises.

First off: Woody Harrelson? We can see staking out Woody back in the day-- like fifteen years ago-- when he starred in Natural Born Killers, or when it was revealed that his dad the hitman had claimed to be part of the JFK assassination team.

But today? What interest would Harvey Levin have in a 44-year-old man? His site dines on celebutards: kiddie stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton.

The closest connection the site could come up with was Woody’s appearance in the recent movie “A Prairie Home Companion” (which features Lohan).

And that’s the problem for Harvey.

See, TMZ may appear to be a street-level website that allows the people to play celebutainment reporter.

But dig into the site and see it spelled out that “this site is controlled and operated by TMZ.com., a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, 1840 Victory Blvd., Glendale, CA 91201… Please forward any questions regarding other legal matters to legal@wb.com.”

Woody Harrelson’s new movie is distributed by Picturehouse, a specialty film company formed by New Line Cinema and HBO.

Both are divisions of Time Warner.

So a Time Warner company is attacking a Time Warner star, and through the ensuing bad publicity, possibly affecting the bottom line of a Time Warner movie.

Of course, there’s precedent again, going back to the rip-roaring days of Fox’s A Current Affair (and Premier Story producer Jim Sheehan tried to file charges against Princess Diana's driver when he was run over on a NYC street-- see Tabloid Baby, Chapter 31, and view the video here). But back then, the targets were fat and powerful, from Senators to CEOs. Sean Elder hit on it in a Salon.com article about Tabloid Baby author Burt Kearns:

"It was never journalism," Kearns says of what they were doing. "It was what the Australians would call a piss-take on journalism." And it was much safer -- and more just -- to "take the piss" out of public figures like Steven Spielberg, whose divorce from Amy Irving got the "Current Affair" treatment, including clips from "Jaws" that equated interloper Kate Capshaw with Bruce the Shark. This resulted in a phone call from Spielberg to Fox studio head Barry Diller, which Kearns interprets as follows:

"Hello, Steven!"

"Barry, if I live to be 90, I will never do a movie for Fox."

Kearns estimates that cost the company around $500 million.

The uncomfortable conflict of interest followed as the A Current Affair team took over Hard Copy at Paramount. And it didn’t take long for the studio to replace them, and use the show as a bargaining chip to get celebrities to appear on their innocuous “Entertainment Tonight” (even promising George Clooney in writing that they’d keep him off Hard Copy if he’d cooperate with ET (then foolishly breaking the agreement and spilling the beans). The whole genre shifted from newsmaking, trendsetting, comment and satire to the safe, corporate celebsucking PR shizzle of ET, Extra and Access Hollywood.

TMZ is an offshoot of Extra--you know, one of those shows that vowed not to buy stalkerazzi footage.

Harvey, by the way, appears in Chapter 28 of Tabloid Baby, “Where’s The Bag, Mr. Kardashian?”, as a local news reporter who took himself very seriously, trying to play the tabloid game and almost causing a mistrial in the OJ Simpson case in the process.

EXCLUSIVE: HARVEY LEVIN TAKES TABLOID BABY'S ADVICE, PROMISES THAT TV SERIES WILL NOT RESEMBLE CORPORATE PORN-PUSHING GOSSIP SITE!

With only three Harveys to go before the debut of the syndicated television series based on the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, its editor and "main on-air-personality" Harvey Levin confirms to the Associated Press that he has taken the free consultancy advice offered for months on Tabloidbaby.com-- and that the television show will not include any of the sleazy, sordid, pornographic and crass elements that are hallmarks of the TMZ website.

"There are obviously things we can do on the Web site that we can't do on TV, and we're not trying to do that. So it's finding the right tone and the right personality. But I know what people want: They want different and they want humor."

Levin's comments are ripped directly from advice we've offered TMZ, for free-- far more knowledgably and effectively than that of their high-priced TV consultants.

On August 12th, when asked by Luke Ford, we explained why we don't like the form of tabloid journalism practiced by TMZ: "Good tabloid has a sense of humour... Tabloid is the ability to tell any story— no matter how sordid or shocking— to any audience, to the Queen of England, as we used to say, as long as you tell the story the right way."

And on August 15th, we reiterated: "We've watched as tabloid television devolved from something truly revolutionary and funny-- a cultural and political force-- to a corrupt, celeb-kissing, product-pushing, epileptic fit-inducing irrelevant waste of airtime. If he really wants to succeed, Harvey should take the advice from people who know: the audience. And the audience is speaking...

We're here for you Harvey. But the fact that the show promises to be a pale, whitebread, wimpy version of the kinky, nasty, dirty website-- complete with serio-newso co-hosts-- does not bode well for the show's future. If you're going to go for it, it won't work if you go halfway. (Our point is that it won't work at all, because what attracts people to the website just can't work in a show aimed at a mainstream American audience (and we're writing from Utah, so we have an idea of what we're talking about).

Meanwhile, according to the AP, the producers of those corrupt, celeb-kissing, product-pushing, epileptic fit-inducing irrelevant wastes of airtime are excited to see TMZ try... and fail:

"The way I look at it, we're in the limo with the stars. They're chasing the limo," said Lisa Gregorisch-Dempsey, "Extra" senior executive producer (and Levin's former colleague on "Celebrity Justice"). "It's a completely different point of view."

Linda Bell Blue, executive producer for "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider," adopted an equally confident posture in an e-mailed comment.

"With 26 years under `ET's' belt, we have the best connections in the entertainment business and the best connection with our audience. We're excited that people's interest in celebrity journalism remains very high ...." Bell Blue said.

As yet another show joins the fray, however, consumer fatigue seems to be a possibility.

"I don't see any signs of it. The television marketplace has an insatiable appetite for celebrity news," said Greg Meidel, president of MyNetworkTV.

Offers Gregorisch-Dempsey of "Extra": "All this guilty pleasure stuff that people want to talk about ... they have to get it somewhere."