Amongst the many execrable and vile moments to come out of the leftist media complex following the assassination of Turning Point USA Founder and key Trump ally Charlie Kirk, one of the most disgusting came from TMZ, which tried covering the Kirk assassination and ended up airing footage of its staffers cheering, laughing, and applauding as Kirk’s death was announced.
As could be expected, TMZ scrambled wildly to save its reputation after the horrible clip, which had TMZ staffers cheering and clapping in the background immediately upon receiving the news that Kirk had been assassinated in Utah during a college speaking event. The TMZ team released a video apologizing for the horrid tastelessness of the incident, and tried to claim that the cheering was unrelated to Kirk’s death.
Beginning the video statement addressing the incident, which quickly went viral online and led to immense backlash against the outlet, TMZ founder Harvey Levin said: “We were livestreaming all day during this tragedy when something happened in our office. As 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 and they were laughing, they were clapping, and you could hear it out here.”
Continuing, Levin insisted that the staffers weren’t laughing at Kirk’s death, despite the fact that their laughter came around when the car chase news report cut to an announcement of it, saying, “And we want to make a couple of things clear. One is that, I know these people, and they were not laughing, they were not reacting that way about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. They were not. They would not work here if they did.”
At that point, the TMZ executive producer, Charles Latibeaudiere, chimed in and commented on the situation, claiming that the problem was “horrible timing” rather than the outrageously awful behavior of the outlet’s staffers, saying, “That being said, we acknowledge that it was horrible timing, and for that we are sorry.”
Latibeaudiere continued, insisting again that it was merely “horrible timing” that was the problem here, saying, “And I get why if you were watching the stream, you may have felt that that’s what the laughter was about. We assure you it was not about that, but it was horrible timing.”
Latibeaudiere further noted, commenting on the inappropriate nature of the laughter, “You can go back and look on the stream. I actually walked off camera to go back and find out what the hell was going on because it was inappropriate for the laughter at that time. But no one was laughing about the Charlie Kirk tragedy.” Levin then concluded the video apology by saying, “Nevertheless, we apologize for the way it sounded.”
"*" indicates required fields
Watch the apology here:
Casting doubt on the veracity of their claims, Mediaite noted that the car chase coverage had been interrupted by an announcement of Kirk’s death, which would have occurred around when they were laughing and cheering. Mediaite said, “A car chase in Los Angeles was being aired by ABC7 on Wednesday during TMZ’s livestream. However, during coverage of the car chase, the network announced that Kirk had passed away.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video