|
|
Daily News
|
|
Clooney Takes on Gawker
By flooding the web site's "Gawker Stalker" section with fake sightings,
George Clooney hopes to protect the safety of fellow celebs.
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 at 12:05 AM
By Sawsan Antoun
|
.jpg)
|
|
Christina Radish
Photo
|
|
Clooney taking on popular celeb dish site gawker.com
|
|
George Clooney is about to pull off his biggest prank yet - on the folks at
popular web site gawker.com. The site currently allows people to post celebrity
sightings but had not included maps to the specific locations of these celebrity
sightings until recently. Now, according to the Associated Press, Clooney, well
known for his jokes and antics, is serious about putting an end to the site
that he and others view as a threat to celebrities.
Clooney hopes to flood the web site's "Gawker Stalker" with false posts about celebrity whereabouts, according to his publicist Stan Rosenfeld. In an email he circulated on the actor's behalf to other high-profile publicists, Clooney calls for publicity firms and their clients to participate in the effort to undermine the site.
"There is a simple way to render these guys useless," Clooney said in the email, according to The New York Post. "Flood their web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars."
Clooney has always been an advocate of the First Amendment but says the paparazzi and the tabloids often cross a line. "A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this web site is worthless," continues the email. "No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride."
Gawker.com retaliated online by criticizing the actor for climbing on a "soapbox" and by offering a challenge to their readers: The first person to send a recent camera-phone picture of Clooney to Gawker will win DVDs of Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve.
Clooney's operation may already be working. According to Rosenfeld, two stars were sighted in New York by Gawker spies when they were actually overseas. This is a promising sign for publicists who fear the web site endangers their clients by revealing their precise locations. Jessica Coen, the Gawker site editor, assured AP that their readers pose no threat to celebrities. "Our spies are just regular people. Our readers are, for the most part, a very educated, well-meaning bunch."
"For the most part" isn't enough for the stars who feel violated. Rosenfeld
mentioned the name of Rebecca Schaeffer when refuting the claim that sites like
the Gawker are harmless. Schaeffer was the 21-year-old star of television series
My Sister Sam who was killed in 1989 in her Los Angeles home by an obsessed
fan.
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|