Los Angeles Police Embroiled In Rihanna Pictures For Cash Scandal
THE LOS Angeles Police Department places two police on gardening leave, namely Rebecca Reyes and Blanca Lopez, as it probes how pictures of singer Rihanna’s Chris Brown-battered faced wound up on the TMZ website.
Anorak’s Man in LA investigates:
So who else noticed that the week the Los Angeles Police Department placed two cops on leave in its probe of how its evidence photo of the beaten pop star Rihanna wound up on the corporate gossip site TMZ.com, TMZ’s frontman Harvey Levin was in New York cruising for recruits and being feted at the Columbia School of Journalism?
As Gawker says:
The AP reports; supposedly the officers in question met Levin at a gay/lesbian networking event, at least according to a report floated in TheMediaBuffet.com, which last winter was first to report that TMZ paid $62,500 for the police snapshot.
While two women are left hanging and facing the loss of their jobs because the Time Warner-AOL operation (and CNN cousin) allegedly paid $62,500 for the celeb S&M porn, Levin was lecturing a room of privileged J-school students… with his tales of big money and Hollywood glamour amid lowbrow taunts that the newspaper and magazine industry are dead.
TMZ survives and thrives because the clueless old school mainstream operations suppport and use it as a source. We don’t think TMZ would fare quite so well in the rough and tumble journo world without the hundreds of thousands of dollars his corporate overlords give the staff to throw around to corrupt public officials and ruin it for the rest of us by making real whistleblowers gunshy,
A tip of the Tabloid Baby hat, meanwhile, to The Enterprise Report, which does it on a shoestring and has been in front of the pack and on top of the latest TMZ/Levin scandal from the start… – TB
Rebecca Reyes and Blanca Lopez debny any wrongdoing.
Posted: 13th, September 2009 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
