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.