The celebrity-gossip machine that built its brand chasing Hollywood stars through parking lots has turned its cameras on Congress. And the early results suggest Washington's elected officials are even less prepared for the ambush than the average Kardashian.
TMZ has launched a Washington-focused operation called "TMZ DC," deploying paparazzi-style crews to confront lawmakers on sidewalks outside the Capitol, in the hallways of public office buildings, and, in one case that drew national attention, at Disney World. The outlet, which lacks congressional press credentials, is working the edges of the credentialing system, soliciting candid images of politicians from the public and generating the kind of viral content that traditional D.C. media has either avoided or failed to produce.
The Associated Press reported that the push has already created several high-profile moments, and at least one warm reception from a cabinet official. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth singled out TMZ at a Pentagon briefing, calling them "new members of our press group here." TMZ staffer Charlie Cotton then asked Hegseth whether the department should change its name to the "Department of Peace," to which the secretary responded by calling the Pentagon "the Department of War" and adding that "the one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military."
The most telling episodes so far have not come from Pentagon briefings. They have come from the candid images TMZ is gathering of lawmakers away from Washington during moments of political consequence.
During the recent congressional recess, which overlapped with the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown, TMZ published images of lawmakers from both parties who had left the capital. Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Robert Garcia, and Rep. Jared Moskowitz were among those pictured. Moskowitz was shown at his son's basketball game.
The optics of Rep. Robert Garcia spotted away from Washington as TSA agents worked without pay captured exactly the kind of disconnect between the governing class and the governed that traditional media outlets have been slow to illustrate.
But no single image landed harder than the photo of Sen. Lindsey Graham holding a wand at Disney World. Robert Thompson, a trustee professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said the Graham photo was genuinely newsworthy, and it was. The image circulated widely while a congressional funding standoff left airport security lines in chaos. Graham's office did not respond to a request for comment.
That is the TMZ formula at work: catch the powerful in an unguarded moment and let the picture do the talking. It is a formula Hollywood learned to fear years ago. Washington is just now getting the introduction.
Because TMZ is not credentialed by the congressional press galleries, its reporters cannot enter the spaces where the Capitol Hill press corps traditionally operates. Instead, they work the sidewalks and public hallways, spaces where anyone with a camera and a question can operate.
The results have been uneven but revealing. In one exchange, TMZ asked Rep. Troy Downing, a Montana Republican, about a party hosted by Grindr ahead of the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Downing's response was telling in its confusion.
"I don't understand. Are they a media company?"
In another clip, TMZ asked Rep. Lateefah Simon, a California Democrat, how lawmakers celebrate the 4/20 marijuana holiday. Simon's answer went somewhere no one expected.
"4/20 is the day that my daddy died. My dad was an amazing man in San Francisco. I think about him every single time there's 4/20."
These are not gotcha moments in the traditional sense. They are something closer to what happens when politicians accustomed to scripted exchanges with credentialed reporters suddenly face questions from a crew that does not play by the same rules. Some lawmakers handle it fine. Others look like they have never been asked an unscripted question in their lives.
As congressional staffers scramble to adjust to the new dynamic, the question is not whether TMZ belongs in Washington. It is why the rest of the press corps left this lane empty for so long.
The timing of TMZ's arrival is not accidental. Washington in 2026 looks less like the sober policy capital of a generation ago and more like a reality-television set. More than a half-dozen stars from the "Real Housewives" franchise recently swung through Capitol Hill. Three lawmakers resigned in April alone after varying allegations. Gallup polling released the same week found disapproval of Congress at 86 percent, tying the record high.
Meanwhile, AP-NORC polling showed 33 percent of U.S. adults approve of President Trump's overall job performance, a decline of 9 percentage points since early in his second term. The public is unhappy with nearly everyone in elected office, and the institutions that are supposed to hold those officials accountable are contracting, not expanding.
The Washington Post cut nearly a third of its staff in February. NOTUS is rebranding as The Star with ambitions to fill part of the gap, particularly in local and sports coverage. Into that vacuum walks TMZ, an outlet founded in 2005, named for the 30-mile zone around the historic center of the Los Angeles entertainment industry, and built on the premise that famous people behave very differently when they think no one is watching.
The recent upheaval in Washington's legacy media landscape has only widened the opening.
TMZ is not without baggage. The outlet made its name with sleazy and sensational celebrity news. Harvey Levin, the Los Angeles lawyer who runs TMZ, has had an off-and-on relationship with Trump. TMZ has not denied paying for story tips, a practice that could run afoul of congressional ethics rules if applied to political sources, though no specific enforcement action has been described.
And the outlet had a high-profile failure in 2024, when it reported Beyoncé would perform at the Democratic National Convention. She did not.
Fox News Radio reported that TMZDC is already pushing daily social video updates from D.C. even without a formal office, covering both politics and pop culture. The speed of the rollout suggests TMZ sees Washington not as a side project but as a growth market.
Critics will dismiss TMZ's Washington push as tabloid spectacle. But the ambush interview has a pedigree in American journalism that predates TMZ by decades. Mike Wallace, the longtime CBS correspondent, made a career habit of it. And nearly 40 years ago, former Miami Herald reporter Tom Fiedler confronted Sen. Gary Hart in a Washington alley before news broke of the extramarital affair that ended Hart's 1988 presidential campaign.
Fiedler, reflecting on that episode, said the confrontation was not premeditated.
"We simply found ourselves in that situation. At that point, we knew that he knew we were there to observe what he was doing. Our feeling was we needed to let him know who we were so he wouldn't think there was, in the worst case, an attempted assassin stalking him."
The broader media-driven political conflicts shaping Washington today are different in form from the Hart era, but the underlying principle is the same: public officials who exercise power on the taxpayer's dime should expect to answer for how they use their time.
Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette blogger who covered Washington with irreverence in the early 2000s, said she was surprised TMZ had not arrived sooner.
"I am legitimately surprised they weren't already there. They're actually a little bit late to the game."
Cox said she had wanted to "demystify politics and show that these are people who don't necessarily deserve our respect." But she also offered a note of caution about the limits of mockery as political commentary, saying, "Funny is how we got here. Making fun of Donald Trump did not work."
The deeper story here is not about TMZ. It is about the failure of the existing Washington press corps to do the basic work of holding elected officials visually and personally accountable in the age of social media.
For years, the D.C. press operated on a system of access, credentials, and mutual respect that served reporters and politicians alike. Reporters got quotes and scoops. Politicians got to control the frame. The public got whatever both sides agreed to release.
TMZ does not operate inside that system. It does not need credentials to stand on a public sidewalk. It does not need an invitation to photograph a senator at a theme park. And it does not need a press secretary's blessing to ask a congressman about a dating app's party.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner weekend, with its blend of celebrity, media, and political self-congratulation, is almost a parody of the culture TMZ was built to cover.
Whether TMZ's Washington experiment produces lasting journalism or just viral clips remains to be seen. The outlet's track record is mixed. Its methods raise legitimate questions about source payments and editorial standards. And its lack of congressional credentials limits where it can go.
But the fact that a gossip outlet can walk into the capital, point a camera at a lawmaker, and produce content that millions of Americans find more honest than a Sunday-show interview tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Washington press corps.
When TMZ is the one catching senators at Disney World while the government shuts down, maybe the question isn't what took TMZ so long. Maybe it's what the credentialed press was doing all that time instead.
