Could TMZ Bring Accountability to American Politics?

TMZ is branching out from the Hollywood Hills to Capitol Hill.

On March 26, 2026, they put out a open call for pictures to be taken of politicians spotted out over Easter weekend, and it could be just the thing to bring more accountability to American politics.

You might be thinking, really? TMZ and accountability?

To understand how TMZ can be effective, you have to understand the United States, its elections, and its relationship with the media.

In the United States, we elect politicians to represent us in government. Elections are just one way the law allows us to replace the leaders we feel aren’t representing us well or making the changes we want to see. If politicians want to be elected or re-elected, they have to do what we, the people, elect them to do. Not only that, but they have to win over the American people, so it matters how they are perceived. This is where the media comes into play.

Think of it as filmmaking v.s. Hollywood: Filmmaking is the actual act of making movies, and Hollywood is about image and perception. If people actually like you (actor, director, etc), they’re more likely to support your work (Film, TV, etc).

When it comes to government, I like to think of it as public service v.s. “politics.”

Public service is the actual boots on the ground work, like drafting legislation. Whereas a big part of “politics” is playing the game of perception. Hence, campaign tours, doing interviews, etc. 

Political campaign tours basically run on the same principle as Hollywood press tours. Perception and likability are key!

Throughout American history, politics and the media have gone hand in hand. From political cartoons, radio interviews, images in newspapers, to televised presidential debates, television commercials, and now social media. Politicians have always relied heavily on the media to get their message across to the public.

With social media being even more crucial in election results over the last ten years, we’ve seen politicians becoming even more and more visible and accessible to the public, where before they may have been harder to reach. Ironically, visibility doesn’t solve a lack of transparency. Just because we’re seeing politicians on our feeds more, doesn’t mean they’re being more honest.

Currently, there is a lack of transparency between the American people and the officials we have elected to represent us.

Politicians benefit from the tax dollars we pay, but they aren’t following through or being truthful. 

Let’s go back to the Hollywood and politics analogy.

For the most part, actors or other celebrities will say whatever they need to say to the public for a plethora of reasons, whether it be promoting a movie or avoiding scandals. It’s the same for politicians.

That is why TMZ may be the answer. The way TMZ and other paparazzi and tabloids pry into the lives of celebrities without second thought or abandon could be exactly the aggressive journalism America needs right now.

Think about it: America is being run not just by a businessman, but a media mogul. His presidency so far has been like a reality show, and many of the people in his cabinet are from the media world. There’s Dr. Oz, a physician and television host, who currently serves as the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Linda E. McMahon, co-founder and former CEO of the WWE, serves as the U.S. Secretary of Education. 

What better way to combat this style of leadership than with the very thing all people in the media try to avoid? The paps!

So here comes TMZ, a tabloid company that is notorious for prying into the personal lives of the rich and famous, often releasing photos and information that is downright intrusive and sometimes evil. They promise that if people send them photos of politicians on vacation, they will help demand accountability.

In a time of cellphones and technology like Meta glasses, there is a general lack of privacy that previous generations didn’t have to face, where at any moment someone could be recording you, and you would never know it.

Everyone is a paparazzi now; all anyone needs is a recording device and a little bit of nosiness. People even go as far as to record strangers! It’s no longer just celebrities who are concerned with being photographed during their off time, but everyday people.

By calling for people to send in pictures of politicians on vacation, TMZ is tapping into a gold mine! Essentially allowing people to channel the power of surveillance into holding their elected officials accountable. It would seem that the paps might be obsolete when everyone can take a photo or record a video, but TMZ has found a way around it, a way to funnel all that media attention back through themselves.

And they found the perfect timing: amidst last month's government shutdowns, T.S.A. agents working with no pay, and waiting for Congress to make a decision, while members of Congress take two-week vacations, during which many will travel by plane. 

The hypocrisy is hard to miss.

Since the current political landscape looks like a reality show, with members of the administration being fired like a Survivor elimination, who better than TMZ to step up to the plate to hold them accountable?

TMZ created an avenue for the people’s frustration to become motivation, and for that motivation to become an actionable step. It’s honestly genius.

In a way, it taps into the very heart of the American experiment, the idea that, if we the people don’t like how our leaders are acting, we can do something about it.

Time will tell how much this will change things, but in a rapidly changing, image-obsessed political landscape, it might be the perfect start.

Fandom Spaces Have a Boundary Problem

At the end of February, amid the ever-persisting Heated Rivalry craze, an article was published for New York Magazine called “The Great Fujoshi Awakening: Why Do So Many Women Love Men Who Love Men?” In the article, the author made very specific references to works of fanfiction online, going so far as to link one of the works within the article. There was immediate public outcry by fans on Twitter discussing the impropriety of bringing free fan works into a for-profit space without the fanfiction author’s consent. While the work was delinked soon after, it brought attention to the rapidly increasing lack of boundaries in fandom spaces, both by fans, people interacting from an outsider perspective, and people involved in the source material.

A multitude of comments have surfaced recently regarding a “separation of church and state” in an analogy for keeping fandom spaces separate from the creators and/or cast and crew of the source material the fans are for. This idea is not new, as there have been conversations around the legality of fanfiction for quite some time. There can be copyright problems, which fans of Anne Rice’s literary works are probably familiar with. Rumors around Anne Rice suing fans for writing fanfiction in the 1990s have circulated for years, but in reality, she just took a stance against fanfiction out of a desire for creatives to come up with their own stories and leave her alone. Some fans said they received cease-and-desist letters from Rice’s lawyer to remove their fanfiction from the internet. It is important to note that Rice later changed her opinions on fanfiction due to realizing she could easily avoid coming into contact with fan works. Because similar problems have occurred over the years, some fanfiction websites, like Fanfiction.net, even have a list of authors whose works are prohibited from the site on account of the authors’ stricter copyright claims. 

Most of the time, copyright claims are only an issue for fanfiction if the creator is somehow profiting from the material. Fanfiction is on public websites with free access, and there are rarely instances where fanfiction authors are making money from their works because they know it would be a copyright issue. Part of the problem with the aforementioned article was that it was behind a paywall, indirectly profiting off of someone’s fanfiction that was temporarily linked. It’s incredibly important to note that Heated Rivalry itself stemmed from fanfiction. Author Rachel Reid adapted her first book in the series, Game Changer, from fanfiction she wrote about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She’s far from the first person to do so: Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfiction, and The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood began as Star Wars fanfiction. 

It’s incredibly important to note that what all of these published authors have in common is that they’re women. To recenter Heated Rivalry, much of the backlash revolved around the idea that straight women were fetishizing gay men. There are plenty of straight female fans of Heated Rivalry, but to act as though they’re the only fans of the show or book series is disingenuous. There is a wide array of queer people who are fans of both, and there are queer people in the cast and crew. The show creator himself is a gay man, and he’s spoken at length about the nuances of why women are drawn to the show. The inflammatory comments surrounding the fanbase of Heated Rivalry are steeped in thinly veiled misogyny. When one Twitter user asked, “Why do men keep calling things women are into mass psychosis?”, another replied, “Cause they can’t use female hysteria anymore.” The fanfiction writer whose work was linked in the New York Magazine article made a statement on Twitter about the situation and also called attention to the rampant misogyny and ignoring of just-as-present queer fans. He (@/subc0rax) wrote, “It feels like a shame that an article that’s seemingly willing to engage with the reasons women enjoy this kind of romance and explore the fact that not all of these fans are even women doesn’t seem to be able to connect the dots and entertain the possibility that there are gay men enjoying the current Heated Rivalry craze with the same fervour and adoration as its female audience.” 

Many of the problems stem from fan works reaching the eyes and ears of the authors and other direct participants of the source material. Many of these instances have been brought up in relation to the Heated Rivalry article. One situation was on the Graham Norton Show, where Norton displayed romantic fan art between the X-Men characters Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr to actors James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. It is uncertain as to whether or not Norton received permission from the artist to project it on television and/or show it to the actors, but it also didn’t feel like it was in good faith and was much rather poking fun at the fan art. There have been similar issues in The Pitt fandom, where interviewers have been asking actors directly what their opinions are on ships (desired romantic pairings between characters, short for “relationships”) of their characters, sometimes even asking if they’re going to happen in the course of the show. An article was recently posted titled “‘The Pitt’ Fans Are Horny Little Freaks,” to which the author was essentially berating fans for shipping characters and creating fan works based on the show. The Pitt actors have also been shown erotic fan art in recent interviews, as a means for inciting some sort of reaction, once again without any consideration for the artists who very probably did not intend for the actors to see it. One Twitter user (@/midwestprincsss) commented, “I really don’t like that fanfic and fanart are being used to make actors give a reaction that’s profitable for the publication interviewing them. Fan work is not for corporations or the folks in the project. It’s for fans.” Most fans feel similarly, especially since the people showing the actors or whoever is involved with the source material are often doing so in bad faith.

Within fandoms, there are boundary problems surrounding parasocialism, in which fans act overly familiar with celebrities as though they know these people in real life. A divisive aspect of fanfiction in many fandoms is real person fiction (RPF), where people write about real people. While plenty of people write and make fan art for their own enjoyment, there are also plenty of people who take it too seriously and begin to intrude on the celebrities’ personal lives. Some will comment cruel things on a celebrity’s Instagram page, and some will go so far as to stalk a certain celebrity and their family. This was a longstanding issue in the Dan and Phil fandom, which kept the YouTubers from talking about their sexualities, relationships, and personal lives for well over a decade. There have been more recent issues for actors in the Disney+ Percy Jackson television adaptation, too, as the teenage lead Walker Scobell took to Instagram to call out “fans” who have been stalking and harassing his friends and family. These examples illustrate that this is not a one-sided issue of outsiders intruding on fandom but also fandom intruding on the lives of the creatives involved in the works they claim to love. 

This is not any one fandom’s problem, as these issues have been arising since before the age of the internet. However, the increased amounts of social media platforms and the rise of public-facing fandoms have made these issues more apparent. So what should we do? First, news outlets need to stop using fan works without the creators’ consent, especially when they’re profiting off of it. Otherwise, fandoms are always going to have problems. There will always be plenty of kind, welcoming, and respectful fans, just as there will always be some fans who start arguments, breach boundaries, and give their fandoms a bad reputation. As many things do these days, many of these problems boil down to critical thinking and media literacy skills. There needs to be a boundary between fans and what their fandom is for, or we will lose any worthwhile contact going forward. Fanfiction writers and fan artists shouldn’t be afraid of their works being exposed on television or published articles, and actors and other creators shouldn’t be afraid of their lives or the lives of their loved ones being aggressively disrupted.

From Novels to the Silver Screen: AI and the Future of Creativity

At first, AI couldn’t generate images that were realistic enough to be taken seriously. Now it can make images and videos of people that look more real by the day.

Before, you could barely generate a picture of Zendaya, but now, you can make an image of Zendaya getting married, and people will actually fall for it!

AI has slowly but surely infiltrated creative spaces. Almost every day, there’s a new example.

Recently, the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard was cancelled and discontinued in the U.K after the author was suspected of using AI to write it. The author said that she didn’t use AI to write the book (which was originally self-published), but that her editor used AI to edit the version published with Hachette Book Group without telling her.

There’s Matthew McConaughey, who signed with ElevenLabs to create a Spanish-language version of his newsletter using their AI technology. Darren Aronofsky released a short-form Revolutionary War series called On This Day… 1776 that is entirely AI-generated, though it features real SAG-AFTRA voice actors.

Through AI, the late Val Kilmer’s likeness will be used in the 2026 film, As Deep as the Grave. He was unable to film this role due to illness, and will posthumously “star” in the film through an AI-generated performance, with permission from his estate and children.

Increasingly, AI-generated content is being used alongside human creativity and in conjunction with creative/artistic industries. But does AI truly belong in our creative spaces?

It doesn’t, and there’s a laundry list of reasons why.

It’s not just that data centers use billions of tons of water to run, or that it’s used to generate inappropriate images of people without their consent, or that they could be used to generate images of people doing criminal activities they never did.

AI has set a precedent that the human brain can’t be creative on its own. It’s creating learned helplessness.

Creativity is integral to who we are as human beings. In childhood, we play dress up and make believe, we create stories and dream up entire worlds. But AI cannot create from scratch; it can only take what already exists in the world or on the internet and repackage it.

In 2025, there was talk of legal action against OpenAI, whose image & video generation model Sora 2 was being used to generate images that replicated the animation style of Studio Ghibli films. The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), a Japanese organization that works to protect Japanese IP like Studio Ghibli, even requested that “its members’ content is not used for machine learning without their permission.” Though human beings will always make art, the virality of trends using AI-generated images and videos is undeniable and makes the future of art feel uncertain.

So far, the response to the use of AI in creative spaces is to set guidelines around its use.

Hachette’s decision to pull Shy Girl from shelves is just one example of a company taking a clear stance on AI, and they’re not the only ones. Recently, a New York Times critic was dropped after it was discovered he used AI to write a book review. Last June, more than 1,000 authors signed an open letter against the use of AI in publishing.

These decisions will set a precedent in how publishers and companies in general handle AI-generated content in creative spaces going forward.

There will never be a time again when AI-generated material won’t exist. The cat is indeed out of the bag, but we get to decide how far it goes.