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Lots of people tuned into the Democratic National Convention Thursday night to see Kamala Harris. But lots of people were also expecting to see Beyoncé, too.
Harris, who was supposed to show up, showed up. Beyoncé, who was never officially listed on the DNC's schedule, didn't.
So why were people expecting to see her?
For a bunch of reasons.
For starters, there was some logic to it. Harris has been using Beyoncé's "Freedom" as her campaign's theme song for the last month. Harris had already brought one Very Big Celebrity onstage at the convention in Chicago — Oprah Winfrey. And there was lots of internet speculation that someone big might make a surprise appearance.
By Thursday evening, betting markets like Polymarket thought Beyoncé was an odds-on favorite to perform. People at the DNC were telling other people at the DNC that they had heard that other people were sure she was going to make a blockbuster appearance.
But the main reason many reasonable people assumed this was a done deal was that TMZ said it was going to happen: "Exclusive: BEYONCE PERFORMING AT DNC'S FINAL NIGHT!!!" the site proclaimed at 7:49 p.m. ET, just before most networks started their primetime coverage.
The site's story was cited throughout the media ecosystem, including normally staid, by-the-book outlets like Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. And TMZ's story didn't change throughout the duration of the DNC's last night — even after Beyoncé's rep had told the Hollywood Reporter she was not performing, and even after Harris had finished her acceptance speech and balloons were filling the stage at the United Center.
Eventually — at 12:30 a.m. ET on Friday, TMZ fessed up: BEYONCE NOT AT DNC AFTER ALL, it acknowledged. "To quote the great Beyoncé: We gotta lay our cards down, down, down ... we got this one wrong."
To me the interesting part of the story isn't that TMZ blew it, or even how they blew it — though I'd certainly love to hear the backstory. (I've asked TMZ for comment.)
It's that in 2024, for much of the modern media world, a TMZ report is pretty close to accepted fact.
Because for a very long time, TMZ was considered less than by conventional media — a gossip operation that was pretty close to the National Enquirer. Sometimes wrong, sometimes right, always salacious. But never something you'd admit to consuming in polite company, let alone reprinting in a Serious News Operation.
TMZ — both the site and the associated TV show — are now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It started out as part of the company formerly known as Time Warner, and launched in 2005, when the internet was still a curiosity to lots of media grownups.
And for years, the site and Harvey Levin, its operator and figurehead — fascinated big media, too: They wrote profiles about him and his operation's bare-knuckled approach to gathering celebrity news. TMZ paid tipsters for information — a no-no in American media — and often published as soon as it could, even when the subjects it was reporting on claimed the news was false.
To me, TMZ's big breakthrough as a Real News Source was when it broke the news of Michael Jackson's death in 2009. That was a seismic, worldwide event, and it came just as the world was starting to get a sense of how news could jump from a left-field site to digital distributors like Facebook and Twitter, without the mediation of traditional news publishers.
It also underscored one of TMZ's real strengths — getting people around famous people (sometimes their friends and family, sometimes people in coroners offices or other institutions) to share the news about famous people dying.
By 2016, when TMZ broke the news of Prince's death, the Washington Post pointed out that TMZ did this sort of thing all the time, yet traditional outlets were loath to cite it, and often waited for other sources instead — even as the rest of the world consumed the TMZ story.
"The delayed reaction illustrates a paradox about TMZ: Although it has been quite reliable on many major stories, mainstream news sources are reluctant to rely on its say-so alone. The news, in effect, doesn't become news until another source matches TMZ's reporting."
TMZ's go-go-go approach still gets stuff wrong. And Levin's chumminess with Donald Trump has led to allegations that the site's no-holds-barred approach to news may actually have some bars when it comes to Trump (again, drawing a parallel with the National Enquirer, which literally worked on Trump's behalf).
But the fact is that for lots of people — even people who run Serious News Organizations — TMZ is now fully considered a legitimate news source.
And if you still aren't convinced, see this tweet from CNN's Abby Phillip, who declared that "TMZ lost a lot of credibility tonight."
You can't lose it unless you already have it.
