TMZ's Harvey Levin talks about Marion Barry "crack mayor" headline controversy

There's a lot of uproar over a TMZ headline announcing Marion Barry's death on Sunday. It reads: "Marion Barry -- Crack Mayor Dead At 78." We asked TMZ creator Harvey Levin about it in a live interview on FOX 5 News, and he said the headline will not be changed despite the outrage some have expressed.

Many people have taken offense to the headline, and have been sounding off on social media. FOX 5 has received hundreds of phone calls, Facebook messages, tweets and emails about it. There's also a change.org petition demanding that TMZ apologize and change the headline. By 5 p.m. Monday, the petition had more than 17,500 signatures.

In the live interview on FOX 5, Levin said a lot of people don't know Barry for anything other than the incident where he was captured on video lighting a crack pipe in a D.C. hotel room. Levin said the thinking behind the headline was that was the defining moment in Barry's life for many people who the District.

"A lot of poeple don't know Mayor Barry for anything other than an incident that took him beyond the borders of D.C. and the borders of the civil rights movement as well, and it became a really big news story. If you ask people in Missouri or California, most people are going to say that."

Levin says when it comes to the headline itself, he gets it, and he knows that a lot of people are upset about it.