In an attention-getting game of journalistic Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Gawker‘s John Cook is reporting that The New York Times might be working on a report that President Obama is depressed. Citing a “source inside the Times,” Cook offers a preemptive critique of such a report, and leaves open the possibility that the end product could be watered down from that clinical premise.

Either way, the President sure looks like he’s having fun these days.

Earlier today Gawker published the much ballyhooed “bombshell” story that Nick Denton had previously alluded to as the supposed motivation behind what appeared to be a recent spate of attacks made by Fox News outlets towards Gawker. The story, reported by John Cook, alleges that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly may have sought a police investigation into a detective who had is alleged to have had a relationship with O’Reilly’s wife.

Fox & Friends‘ Steve Doocy hosted BreitbartTV Editor-in-Chief Larry O’Connor this morning to discuss reports of several popular websites that are now, supposedly, “dead or dying.” The real target here, though, was obviously Gawker, who Fox says has lost 75% of its traffic since last year. You can almost audibly hear the axes grinding, as Fox extracts some payback for Gawker’s unflattering coverage of Fox News, and O’Connor blames the whole thing on liberal hoity-toitiness. Gawker’s Nick Denton immediately pushed back against the story.

On Friday morning’s Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy slammed Gawker over a blog post that attempted to extrapolate the identity of the CIA agent responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden. Doocy is correct that the site acted recklessly, but along the way, he gets a key fact wrong, makes an unexplainable comparison to the outing of Valerie Plame, and actually shows a photograph of the man in question, in stunning Hi-Def, to millions of Fox News viewers.

Yesterday, we told you that Gawker and its investigative report John Cook were preparing a civil suit against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in an effort to obtain records that he had met with Fox News head Roger Ailes on September 11th of last year. Cook believes Ailes has a direct hand in GOP politics and may have encouraged Christie to try and seek the Republican nomination for president. The American Civil Liberties Union decided to help the website in its legal pursuits, filing the suit on behalf of Gawker Entertainment LLC.

Now, however, it seems that the organization is having a change of heart.

Gawker and its resident investigative reporter John Cook are planning to file a civil suit today against Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as part of the site’s investigation into whether Christie communicated with Fox News president Roger Ailes… and whether Ailes has a direct hand in politics.

Gawker’s investigation was inspired by New York magazine’s recent, much-publicized profile on Ailes, which noted that the chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group called Christie to encouraged him to campaign in 2012.

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.

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.

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.”

Earlier today a Virgina-based federal judge Henry E. Hudson declared that the newly passed Health Care reform law passed by Obama is unconstitutional. But as is the case in most judicial decisions, the story is far from over. During today press briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert GIbbs averred confident that the law is constitutional. Meanwhile, the partial ownership of a GOP consulting firm has brought the federal judge who made the decision under scrutiny.

So much for the Christmas spirit. This afternoon, Ben Armbruster of Think Progress published a blog post about Texas Tea Partiers who are working to oust Rep. Joe Straus from his position as the state’s House Speaker. Straus’s detractors aren’t working against the representative because of his political views—Straus is a Republican. Instead, they’re calling for him to be thrown out of office because he’s Jewish.

When James Risen‘s story about the bankable mineral deposits in Afghanistan ran in The New York Times on Monday, bloggers were quick to declare that something wasn’t quite right about the timing of the piece, calling the article a reiteration of previously known information in order to beef up support for the war effort in Afghanistan. Now, Risen is telling bloggers that he’s no mouthpiece for Big Brother – and that they should “do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas.”

Gawker is losing one of it’s longest tenured writers, as Alex Pareene announced yesterday afternoon, after it was posted by John Koblin at the New York Observer, that he was leaving Nick Denton’s employ for Slate’s “War Room” blog. This is just the latest in a recent succession of departures from the influential blog, and has been raising questions about what’s going on at their Nolita offices.

At the rate Gawker is going Kirsten Gillibrand may end up owing them her (future) political career. Gawker’s resident reporter John Cook has been doing some relentless digging into Harold Ford — the good-looking former congressman from Tennessee (1997-2007) who is strong rumored to be considering a run for New York Senate — and the results are not great.

Just this week the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), which runs the White House pool has started letting Talking Points Memo, Salon, and the HuffPo in to share the pool duty. A number of establishment people are up in arms about “blurring the line between news and punditry even further.” Should we be worried the inmates are taking over the (clubby) asylum?

We’ve noted a few times in passing on this blog that it sometimes feels like the Gawker websites are determining how media will look online going forward. But today it looks like Gawker is taking one step closer to the mainstream, or at least how the mainstream used to look. Gawker head Nick Denton explains.

Glenn Beck is on the record as saying that he doesn’t belong to any political party, but it’s fair to say that he really, really does not belong to the Democratic Party. So how is it that he wound up with a PR rep whose résumé includes successful representation for a number of Democratic politicians, including “a key role in electing Hillary Rodham Clinton to the U.S. Senate”?

As online writing becomes increasingly a part of the mainstream dialogue in America, “blogger” is no longer a dirty word. Some of the best writers of our time operate exclusively on the internet, but some of the most talented still work under the radar. In this in-depth, magazine-length feature, Mediaite has assembled a list of 25 of the best underappreciated bloggers and explained why they matter.

That is today’s topic of interest for Gawker investigations editor John Cook, who this morning delivered a hilarious rundown of the well-documented unreliability of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke. Fine for a self-employed blogger, but will sick days cut it under new management?

Just after 4pm yesterday Gawker published an enormously disturbing slide show of photos depicting the “animal house” antics. When I saw the post an hour or so later it had already clocked over 12, 000 views. As of this morning 95,000 plus people have seen it. Yesterday evening a State Dept. spokesperson announced an investigation had been ordered. Was the quick response due to Gawker’s involvement?

“I think we have a problem,” said Frank Rich to Rachel Maddow on her show Wednesday night. He was talking about people bringing guns to health care rallies. People are bringing guns to events where President Barack Obama is speaking. And man, is that scary.

What’s the difference between a Web magazine and a Web publication? We’re not 100 percent sure either. But apparently Web magazines harbor ineffectually bloated staffs and when before they turn into Web publications they have to give a few beloved staffers the axe — at least, according to Salon.

It’s hard not to conclude there are two editorial standards at the New York Times: one for Maureen Dowd and one for everyone else. This past May, Dowd “accidentally” lifted a passage from TPM’s Josh Marshall and received a two line editor’s note. Not so for Times Mag writer Charles Siebert! Is there a double standard at work?

Lately, Gawker has been working overtime lecturing other media outlets about their ethics, even casting a jaundiced eye in our direction. They also ran 2 pieces attacking, alternately, Politico’s Mike Allen and the White House press corps for attending an off-the-record 4th of July event at the White House. As it turns out, Gawker’s outrage [...]