Yesterday, the AP published an extensive piece on “John,” the CIA agent they claim to be the single most important person on the mission to find Osama bin Laden. Needless to say, it took little time for someone to attempt to identify the man, and today Gawker published photos from the White House Twitter feed claiming them to be of the man, courtesy of a leak website that traffics in such information. While there is no confirmation as to the man’s identity, someone may have been tossed into al-Qaeda’s cross-hairs today.

Perhaps owing to a classic summer news lull (combined with Casey Anthony Trial fatigue) CNN looked to Gawker for news today. The Situation Room devoted a segment to yesterday’s story on Fox Chief Roger Ailes and some memos unearthed by Gawker’s John Cook. CNN producers sought a statement from Fox News who insisted that a statement would be forthcoming if they ran it unedited. CNN refused to air it “sight unseen,” Mediaite has obtained the full statement that CNN did not run.

Gawker’s investigative reporter, John Cook, recently combed through various documents (as in, 318 pages of memos, letters, outlines and resumes) detailing Fox News president Roger Ailes‘ working relationship to the White House under President Richard Nixon.

Comedian Harry Shearer, who has a fetish of some kind for watching news anchors and reporters as they prepare to go on camera, has posted a clip of ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer as she prepped to anchor World News from tornado-devastated Joplin, MO. The eight-minute video shows Sawyer standing amid the ruins of a neighborhood–it’s cold, with rain and lightning, Sawyer and her crew sheltered by a small tent as soaked and exhausted ABC News folk set shots, lights, and try to communicate with producers in New York as the network prepares to tell the country a massive, emotional story.

In what is positioning itself to be the next great he said/she said of Summer 2011, Glenn Beck is railing against what he described as a cluster of vile liberal New Yorkers who spilled wine on his wife and otherwise made his family uncomfortable and a film screening in Bryant Park. But after Beck’s account went live yesterday, a witness claiming to be friends with the wine spiller sent a letter to New York disputing his claims, and claiming all was peaceful around the Beck family.

“These people were some of the most hateful people I have ever seen,” said a distraught Glenn Beck this morning as he described an altercation he and his family had last night while watching a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in New York’s Bryant Park. Explaining that a group of people yelled at his family, took pictures of them, and kicked a cup of wine onto his wife, Beck said that his security team feels that, had he reacted poorly, things might have “gone off.”

In the usual absence of any real, meaty (not a pun, thank you) political stories each summer, it’s usually something completely absurd, wild and/or scandalous that captures the attention of the media and the general public. Summer of ’11 has, so far, been a Summer of Weiner. The so-called “Weinergate” scandal has been the gift that keeps on giving, as far as many media outlets have been concerned, and it’s interesting to see how each has managed to put its own spin on the story. Let’s take a look at how they (and, yes, we) managed it, shall we?

On CNN’s Reliable Sources, the discussion over Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter photo was front and center. The most startling part of the conversation came however when host Howard Kurtz asked Gawker reporter Maureen O’Connor whether her site has “a big advantage covering this story in a way the mainstream media can’t, starting with the language that you can use,” which strangely predicted what was about to come next.

We get that a lot, actually. Gawker‘s Jeff Neumann took a shot at Mediaite Thursday morning over the length and girt of our coverage of “Weinergate,” noting that “other stuff is happening that might be considered so newsworthy,” and laying the blame at the feet of Mediaite founder and publisher Dan Abrams. While we’re glad [...]

Good news for Aol competitor Yahoo: according to an email by Brian Robinson, the senior director of Yahoo Media Network strategies and insights, the traffic experienced by Yahoo blogs over the past few months tops that of the Huffington Post and Gawker.

With the Sony Playstation Network hack being called by some the largest case of personal information theft ever, another high profile case is starting to seem even bigger than previously thought. Last week, news broke that hackers stole personal information of 250,000 potential contestants from Fox’s upcoming American remake of The X-Factor. Now, it seems the group also stole more information as they’ve leaked a database of around 300 Fox Broadcasting employees and associates.

In a big article on the front page, Gawker has found information that they claim proves that Fox News chief Roger Ailes is a “paranoid maniac.” And all they had to do to get it was use the New York Freedom of Information Law to go through the police records in the small town where he lives, root around for all the times he’s mentioned, and then find out why police went to his house! It’s easy! It reminds me of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seminal month-long investigation to prove that March had somehow transformed into April.

Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator Jack McCain, recently interviewed Donald “The Donald” Trump for the Daily Beast. And, predictably, the interview is getting quite a bit of negative feedback from around what some people who aren’t me might refer to as the “blogosphere.” Yes, that’s right, it’s H8er Week here at Mediaite. Kick back, grab a Pabst, and go with it.

Wonkette’s post about Trig Palin‘s birthday – and Tommy Christopher‘s take on the issue – have been surging on Mediaite today, but another story about a politician and his child has been quietly slipping beneath the radar.

Gawker makes a buzzworthy accusation about Fox News chief Roger Ailes, saying hes been “caught spying” on staffers of small-town newspapers in New York’s Hudson Valley that Ailes owns with his wife Elizabeth–even using “News Corp security goons” to tail one of the employees–in a big black SUV. “He noticed a black Lincoln Navigator that seemed to be following him, according to several sources familiar with the incident,” Gawker’s John Cook and Hamilton Nolan write, describing how Joe Lindsley “drove aimlessly for a while to make sure he was being followed, and the Navigator stayed on him.”

CBS News Washington bureau chief Chris Isham says a report that he was an FBI informant is “outrageous and untrue.”

The original report–claiming a journalist at ABC News had cooperated with the FBI–led to a swirl of speculation in media circles. Isham concedes he may have been the person being discussed, but he was no “informant.” Isham worked as an investigative journalist at ABC, and he says he would contact the FBI in the course of stories to attempt to confirm facts.

As James Franco continues to be everything Charlie Sheen is struggling to become, a new chapter in the ongoing quixotic art project that is Franco’s career unfolded today as his Twitter account mysteriously disappeared. The event would not have prompted as many raised eyebrows had Franco not recently complained of anonymous forces pressuring him into complacency on the medium, and his declaration that, in its entirety, “social media is over.”

Today, Gawker Media’s Lifehacker site announced that $2,000 would be awarded to whomever could come up with a solution for a stubborn kink in the blog network’s much talked-about redesign. You might remember that, last week, we reported on a memo sent by Gawker founder Nick Denton, basically admitting to staffers that the site’s new look and navigation wasn’t all they’d hoped it would be. So, it seems, they’re now turning to their readers for help – the very readers, it should be pointed out, who have expressed feeling increasingly ignored or undervalued by Gawker, if the sentiments in this comments thread are anything to go by.

Fox News gets plenty of flak for its political coverage from detractors, but today it’s the network’s science coverage that has come under fire. An article on the network’s science page boasts a shocking “exclusive“: a scientist has found life on other planets! Fascinating, except Gawker’s Adrian Chen did some research on the scientist behind the discovery, and it appears that the finding is not quite new and about as “exclusive” as a Charlie Sheen interview.

It’s not a shirtless congressman with a red Blackberry, but it’s a pretty stunning photo anyway. Gawker has posted a photo from a “tipster” of what appears to be a display at the Baby Gap store near Union Square in Manhattan. And wow, if that doesn’t look like a stylized tree with two very real ropes tied like nooses. And that just doesn’t scream baby to me.

It seems our initial hesitation to embrace the site’s bold new design choices was totally warranted – so many people had issues with Gawker’s new look (and, subsequently, unique views to the site dropped) to the point that Gawker Media founder Nick Denton sent out a memo basically admitting that the whole… experiment… could have gone better.

It’s been a sensational–but short–story: Rep. Chris Lee, resigning just hours after Gawker published a story suggesting he’d sent shirtless photos of himself to a woman he connected with via Craigslist. The story moved so quickly Wednesday evening (hitting just in time for the primetime cable news shows, fortunately) the scandal had nearly run its course before the author of the original blog post even got her proverbial fifteen minutes. Thankfully, CNN’s Piers Morgan was able to squeeze in a few moments during his live (with studio audience, no less) interview of Donald Trump for Gawker’s Maureen O’Conner, who seemed delighted to be there.

With many still buzzing about the deal between AOL and The Huffington Post, the speculation over what website might be gobbled up next is running rampant, with even a New York Times blog suggesting that Gawker Media could be next. There are many reasons why this is not likely to occur, one of which is that Gawker’s founder Nick Denton exhibits an entirely different, less spotlight-hungry personality than Arianna Huffington.

One of the most frequently used short-hand criticisms of Glenn Beck is that he’s nothing but a crazy conspiracy theorist scaring his viewers needlessly. This criticism heated up considerably in the past week as Beck made connections between the uprising in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and his usual enemies of Marxists attempting to create a One World Order. An article on Gawker entitled “The Right-Wing Nut’s Guide to Egypt” used him as a poster boy. Reason’s Michael Moynihan called that episode “the dumbest thing ever broadcast on (non-cable access) television.” On Beck’s own network, The Daily Beasts’ Michelle Goldberg called his notions “lunatic theories” on Fox & Friends. Beck played that clip on today’s show and chuckled and promised viewers they’d “feel bad” for Goldberg by the end of the show. But, if he really wanted to hit back at these accusations, Beck should stop trying to prove his theories and start offering solutions.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had “turned to” film director Steven Spielberg for advice in how to “rebrand” the House Democrats in the coming year. The story was picked up by a litany of websites including The Drudge Report and Gawker, but according to Mediaite‘s sister site Gossip Cop, the report is inaccurate.