Why, no, I don't believe I will -- at least not until someone comes up with the footage of a car chase.
Does that sound like a non-sequitur? Just wait for the payoff. Yesterday, Harvey Levin fronted real-time coverage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk for his own TMZ. At the moment that word broke of Charlie's death, Levin passed it along with genuine gravitas -- while the studio behind him erupted in cheers and laughter. Social media users dragged TMZ for its ghoulishness for hours -- and of course, the clip went viral:
TMZ is the most disgraceful News channel f*** you f*** your staff y'all can go to hell to actually celebrate and yell and laugh because Charlie Kirk died you are disgrace https://t.co/8Gmyw7kXSb
— Donald Cunningham (@Shadowlair636) September 11, 2025
Despicable, right? Well, much as MSNBC did yesterday, TMZ hit reverse after its public beating on Twitter. However, Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere added a rather weird claim to their apology video yesterday. According to their version of events, their staffers were laughing at a police chase they were watching live, and not about Charlie's death:
Addressing tone deaf laughter pic.twitter.com/7lOvG7z3H4
— TMZ (@TMZ) September 11, 2025
'We were livestreaming all day during this tragedy,' Levin began during an apology video alongside Latibeaudiere.
'When we were reporting the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there were some people in the back room, away from our news desk here, who were watching a car chase.'
He explained that those individuals were laughing and clapping at the car chase, not Kirk being shot in the neck.
Levin went as far as to say those people 'would not work here' if they found Kirk's death funny in any way.
'We acknowledge that it was horrible timing,' Latibeaudiere chimed in. 'And for that, we are sorry. 'We assure you, [the laughter] was not about that.'
Ahem. Let's first take this from a news-coverage point of view. Here we have a newsroom doing a live stream on one of the most important and explosive stories of the year, a breaking news story with all sorts of updates and developments. Are we to believe -- while Levin was on set calling out for updates from Fox, as seen in the video -- that the 'reporters' on the set were watching a car chase taking place in Los Angeles? Really?
If that were true, none of them should be working there anyway. I mean, a car chase in Los Angeles is something akin to a smoggy day in SoCal. What news value would another car chase have? And especially when a story about a political assassination was unfolding in real time, where updates and info were both coming at firehose speed and almost impossible to verify without massive effort?
Amusingly, it apparently never occurs to Levin or Latibeaudiere that they just admitted to being news-coverage morons, at least if we take this explanation at face value.
However, this smells like a convenient excuse crafted after the fact in an attempt to cover the obvious. Who applauds and laughs out loud at a car chase? Unless we're talking something on the order of Fast & Furious taking place on the streets of Los Angeles, car chases generally provoke reactions no stronger than a head shake or a smirk. That should be especially true to the jaded crew of TMZ and their toxically online vibe. And we're to believe that a significant amount of the newsroom was not only not focused on the huge breaking story playing out in Utah, but were so into a car-chase feed that they broke out into applause and laughter over it?
Come on, man. Don't micturate on our noggins and call it precipitation.
Of course, there's one way of validating this story: show us the car chase. If it were that compelling and entertaining, surely the crew at TMZ saved the video, right? That's what they do for a living. Just roll out the video of the car chase, complete with time stamps to corroborate this claim, with all of the amazing action that supposedly elicitied those responses, and we'll reconsider our initial assessment of TMZ being a bunch of ghastly douchebags.
Until then, I'm sticking with my first impression.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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