I would like to retract the nice things I said about GossipCop.

maura:

Really thought it was going to be, y’know, sort of investigative, but instead, it’s just “Celebrity’s rep this” and “Star’s flack that.” If I wanted to just read an endless stream of publicist denials, I’d pick up People. Sorry!
Gossip Cop is Dan Abrams’ cheap way to endear himself to celebrities and celebrity publicists. It won’t work on either front.

I think Gossip Cop is probably just indicative of naivete on mediaite’s part. Celebrity publicists lie all the time, and for every gossip column I’ve worked on (Page Six, New York’s Intelligencer and Gawker) we either formally or informally kept a running tally of who the biggest liars were and Page Six used to call them out regularly if the Lying Liars Who Lied got too Liar-y even by Hollywood standards.

And entertainment is particularly weird in that respect. There’s a whole infrastructure dedicated to perpetuating stories that aren’t true—and far more so than on any other beat I’ve ever covered. I had a friend who worked at Star and had to polygraph sources all the time—some of which were inevitably planted by the celebrity publicity machine—and the surprising thing wasn’t how many people lied, it was how many people were such good liars that they could tell a shameless whopper and still pass a polygraph test.

So either mediaite doesn’t understand this and is naively allowing itself to be a mouthpiece for these people (and looking at the flacks they’re asking for comment; they’ve managed to quote some of the most egregious violators) or they know that’s what they’re doing and are just so craven that they don’t care and are willingly perpetuating lies because they can—which would be far more insidious.

I don’t actually think it’s the latter. I think they just don’t have a lot of experience with entertainment journalism (where you can have three sources pop up and tell you same “eye-witness” story about Lindsay Lohan only to find out later that all three were planted by a publicist) and don’t know they’re getting snowed. But it makes the feature pretty much useless.

If they want to make it useful, they should actually investigate the stories themselves. And calling a flack is not investigating. (At any rate, I hope they have the budget for a polygraph machine.)

Source maura