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.

A lesson in points missed

With the best will in the world, I have to question what Mia Farrow thinks she can accomplish with her latest project. Having given birth to the Devil, and been partner to several legends, she's now a humanitarian activist with a big heart and a shocking perm. Incensed by the global indifference to the crisis in Darfur, she's opted to do something to shake us from our apathy. She's going on hunger strike - usually the reserve of dissidents and terror suspects.

Mia has decided that the world will care more about the displacement of 2.5 million people if she stops eating. Despite the fact that she looks like she's a couple of weeks away from her last decent meal anyway. In fact, it's not so much a hunger strike as a sponsored starvation, just without the sponsors.

I can't fault her commitment or passion. But I do question the logic of her action, since the only people likely to care about this are the lazy showbiz journalists looking for an easy story. Possibly the worst offender is Us Magazine, which manages to spectacularly miss the point, time and time again.

Covering Mia's valiant effort, the magazine's website starts off well, by articulating her agenda and the preparation she undertook. But within a couple of paragraphs you can clearly see their attention wandering, as they start to find ways of connecting this article to other (more conventional) stories in their archive. First, Mia mentions Darfur, so Us interrupts the story to link to a travelogue of places in the world that Angelina Jolie has visited.

Mia talks about the damage her body might suffer from her endeavour, so they link to 'other stars who underwent shocking weight transformations'. Best of all, when mentioning George Clooney's support for Mia, they can't help but link to pictures of gorgeous George before he was famous. All in all, it gives the feeling of Newsnight presented by a Heat reader with attention defecit disorder.

I think it's wonderful that celebrities occasionally use their privileged position to raise awareness and engage the public. Unfortunately, the only people who tend to care what they're doing can be just as easily distracted by a picture of a kitten dangling from a window sill. So keep at it Mia, just don't be surprised if people flick past your article to read about Paris Hilton's next parking ticket.