TMZ didn't expose Ray Rice out any social conscience or journalistic integrity; it was simply a business decision.
The website paid more than $100,000 for the two videos of Rice in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino in which he punched his then-fiancée and dragged her out of the elevator, according to an article originally published by The New Yorker, which went on how pubishing the videos were done for financial gain.
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The article revealed that after guards responded to an incident between Rice and Janay Palmer in a lobby of the casino, surveillance officers who knew that TMZ paid for such information began debating whether Rice's on-camera transgression could result in a handsome profit.
"According to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor," the New Yorker reported. After guards responded to the incident in the lobby, several surveillance officers gathered and wondered aloud if a tape of Rice and Palmer could be sold to TMZ-the Web site that, since its inception, in 2005, has taken a merciless approach to celebrity news.
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"At around 4:30 A.M., one of the surveillance officers, sitting at a monitoring-room computer, reviewed footage from a camera that faced the elevator and, using a cell phone, surreptitiously recorded the screen. The officer then called TMZ."
Days after the Rice video went public, TMZ founder Harvey Levin appeared on Fox News' "Media Buzz" program and was asked how TMZ obtains its material.
"It's so funny to me that people ask that question," Levin replied. "We're a news operation. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do."
TMZ earned acclaim for exposing Rice, thought of as one of the NFL's best citizens, as a domestic violence abuser.
"TMZ did the job the mainstream sports media failed to do in showing us the ugliness of this incident," Baltimore Sun TV columnist David Zurawik wrote after Rice had been suspended.
TMZ, however, had a similar damning recording of pop star Justin Bieber as a youth and seemed to have worked out an arrangement with his agent not to publish the recording in exchange for other exclusive information, the New Yorker reported, via the New York Daily News.
A recording of 15-year-old Bieber singing a version of his hit "One Less Lonely Girl," substituting some of the lyrics for racial epithets made its way to TMZ, which decided not to publish the recording.
TMZ subsequently gained some Bieber exclusives.
"After Braun and Levin had their phone conversation," the New Yorker reported, "numerous flattering Bieber-related exclusives appeared on the site: A photograph of Bieber backstage during a commercial shoot; pictures of him getting a haircut; a video of him and his girlfriend Selena Gomez performing karaoke; a story about how he bought 'every single flower' at a florist's and sent the flowers to Gomez's house; video from a trip that Bieber took to Liverpool; and others, including a report of him watching 'Titanic' one night, with Gomez, inside an otherwise vacant Staples Center."
The Daily News labeled the incident as "blackmail."
If Rice wielded as much influence as Bieber, would TMZ have shown equal restraint?
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