Who can't handle the truth?

Famous for his temperamental nature, affinity for starlets and a fondness for Colombia's leading export, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote a spectacular tell-all memoir called 'The Kid Stays In The Picture'. The introduction sets up his warts-n-all approach to autobiography, explaining that "There are three sides to every story. Your version, my version and the truth."

So it's interesting to see that Dan Abrams, a TV host, legal commentator and web entrepreneur is setting up a new website called www.GossipCop.com based on the same fundamental approach. The purpose of the site is to separate fact and fiction on celebrity-related stories, in the hope that it will shut down some of the erroneous non-stories that proliferate over the internet's garden fence.

The idea is that gossip-hungry celeb watchers can use the site as a fact-checker, the next time they see a story they want to know more about. So if you want to know the truth about Britney's role in a Holocaust drama or George Clooney's psychic connection to his dead pot-bellied pig, GossipCop will set you straight. There's even a handy little thermometer to help you assess the where the story sits on the rumour-to-real scale.

Unfortunately, this seemingly noble venture is just another tool enabling celebrities and their PR-mies to manipulate the meaning of the word 'truth'. We live in a world of CelebDaq, where coverage means value. If truth was what really mattered, there'd be no exclusive interviews, stories based on 'insider' leaks, or features that start with "...is rumoured to be..."

As this story points out, we don't actually care whether a story is true or not. We learn as much about celebrities from the false stories as we do from the official coverage. GossipCop may well prove to be a hit, but only because it aggregates lots of celebrity stories in one place. But for a site that represents itself as authoritative, it's weird that truth is a depicted as a sliding scale. Call me old fashioned but I always though that words like 'fact' and 'truth' were absolutes.