As the day has worn on and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams has gone all around talking about his new website venture GossipCop.com, in which his staff debunks gossip and rumors about the celebrity world, we wondered just how far he was willing to go to defend the site’s philosophy. So we asked him if he would walk us through one particular gossip item we’d been wondering about: the unconfirmed reports that he, Dan Abrams, was dating Academy Award–winning actress Renée Zellweger. Disappointingly, there was no comment. It may have been because he was tired of arguing about the site all day — in this video here, for example, you can see Abrams lose his cool at Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. Vanden Heuvel is actually pretty nasty and unfair, asking why Abrams doesn’t concentrate instead on policing “covert ops” and “lobbyists.” Which is completely absurd, and downright snobby, on the face of it. It would be like saying to gardening writers that they were shirking their duty by not writing about how to find Osama bin Laden underground in Pakistan. It’s really laughable, but Abrams doesn’t laugh — instead he snaps, “I don’t want to come on television and be lectured by you on what I should and shouldn’t be doing!” Which, to be fair, we wouldn’t want to do, either, but doesn’t he work at MSNBC? Couldn’t he have, you know, exerted some pressure to not be put in exactly that situation?
