Like the front page of a newspaper, how a website’s news stories are laid out influences how visitors digest the information. And when your A1 slot goes to Britney’s kid sis, well, that thing going on in Iraq is suddenly less relevant.

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That’s what Washington City Paper Angela Valdez is asking to mostly deaf ears. The National Enquirer ran with a story about CBS star Lara Logan having Baghdad romances with CNN’s Michael Ware and U.S. State Department contractor Joe Burkett, and the New York Post picked it up from there. The story even made it to Howard Kurtz’s CNN show Reliable Sources (video here), where he played Jossip’s favorite game: Cover the gossip by reporting on the coverage of the gossip, and asking whether we should be reporting on this at all. Well, perhaps somebody like Kurtz shouldn’t be wasting air time with it, but the Enquirer has a history of reporting on our news men and women; it just so happens that Logan’s story involves sex, with multiple partners, and she’s a pretty lady. So should we be upset by it? Maybe — it’s likely Logan got heavier treatment because she’s a woman, while plenty of male on-air sex trysts go unreported. But also: She’s a high-paid attractive public figure who brought together the words “sex” and “Iraq” for the first time since this war began, and shouldn’t the gossip industry be celebrated for that?

“In the first five-and-a-half months of 2004, the last presidential election year, Fox’s prime-time audience among viewers aged 25 to 54 was more than double that of CNN’s — 530,000 to 248,000, according to estimates from Nielsen Media Research. This year, through mid-June, CNN erased the gap and drew nearly as many viewers in that demographic category as Fox — about 420,000 for CNN to 440,000 for Fox. Meanwhile, CNN has added 170,000 viewers a night, on average, when compared with the last presidential year, while Fox has shed about 90,000, according to Nielsen. (MSNBC, which added 181,000 viewers in that audience, much of it courtesy of gains by “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” still lagged in third place, with 303,000.)” [NYT]

On Wednesday, Fox News popinjay Greta Van Susteren picked a fight with on-air foe Al Sharpton over the reverend’s supposed ditching of her show Tuesday night, less than two hours before he was supposed to appear, to go on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 because Barack Obama’s campaign supposedly asked him to. Now, because we paid attention the first time around, we must also chronicle what happened next. Namely, a round of he-said-she-said.

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Nelson Mandela very well may be a Mandingo, but surely his status as a humanitarian was the bigger story here.

(Click for larger version)

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Seven hundred sixty-five comments later, it’s still unclear whether, ahem, Barack Obama’s campaign is booking for CNN. That’s what Fox News host Greta Van Susteren was asking on her blog GretaWire yesterday when the Rev. Al Sharpton pulled out of a 10pm appearance on her show less than two hours before he was supposed to go on, so he could instead pop up on Anderson Cooper 360. His excuse? The senator’s campaign asked him to appear on CNN on his behalf.

Nevermind that this is sort of a non-item — guests cancel segments all the time (bookers do too!) for one reason or another, and a phone call from Obama’s camp, which Sharpton vehemently supports, isn’t a light request. But our favorite part of Greta’s complaint is the set up, where she gets away with planting an item out of her duty to viewers: “I debated whether to tell you this or not…but I did promise behind the scenes information here on GretaWire….so here it is.” (Not that we’re complaining about any addition to a gossip war.)

Let’s not forget, however, than Ms. Susteren and Mr. Sharpton haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.

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As Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent at CBS News who just returned from Iraq, is given a home base in Washington, there’s one piece of baggage she’ll be bringing with her: a report that she’s the other woman in Texas couple Joe and Kimberly Burkett’s divorce. So the National Enquirer story goes, Logan began seeing Joe in Baghdad, where she was reporting from and where he was a contractor for the U.S. State Department. So distraught was Joe’s wife Kimberly over the affair, she supposedly overdosed on Valium, though she’s also alleged to have carried on her own extramarital dalliance.

And then there’s that other rumor, about Logan’s “romance with a star CNN correspondent.”

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CNN anchor Anderson Cooper found himself the center of attention on his eponymous show last night.

The silver fox had invited Focus On The Family’s Tony Perkins, journo Roland Martin and Reverend Al Sharpton, whom we were surprisingly happy to see you. Well, we weren’t happy to see him, but we were tickled pink when, while discussing James Dobson’s blasting of Barack Obama, Sharpton kinda, sorta outed Cooper: “I may have some very conservative personal feelings but I feel you have the right to live your life differently. I may think that what you do Anderson is gonna put you in Hell, but I’m gonna defend your right to get there.”

Cooper blushed before thanking Sharpton for his concern and insisting that he personally is “not that concerned” about his afterlife. And, really, why would he?

Watch the video, after the jump!

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Is CNN editing interviews on Fareed Zakaria GPS? And if so, for content or time? “About halfway through the interview with Condoleeza Rice I started getting the feeling that this interview had been edited because of the way Rice would finish her sentence and almost instantlaneously Zakaria would ask the next question; and I mean instantaneously and not after a delay of a second or so, except for the space between their final exchange which had what I would consider a ‘natural’ pause one would normally expect from an interview.” [ICN]

Earlier: Normally Attacked By Fox News, NBC and Richard Engel Now Face the Wrath of the White House

In addition to having his page include the phrase “Raw Politics,” Anderson Cooper’s newly redesigned website features this lovely contextual advertisement: “Better Than Bare.”

He managed to include a HUGE photo of himself and the word “raw” on the homepage! [AC360]

On American Morning today, author and CIA veteran Bob Wallce showed off some of the spy industry’s real life gadgets. Including using the stomach of a freeze-dried rat as a storage compartment. [CNN]

A website for those who feel scorned by CNN.com disallowing them from printing up a T-shirt with your favorite headline, despite the news service’s hype about turning any headline into a T-shirt, is born. [NYT] Though, there’s always those vintage options.

In a bit of self-prophesizing, CNN weatherman Rob Marciano answers the question, “Is it possible for a journalist to be a sex symbol?,” asked by V Man, with: “I don’t see why not. Presidential candidates have been called sex symbols. I don’t think the label is exclusive to movie stars.”

In-deed.

Marciano is the men’s fashion rag poster boy for warm fronts (yes, we went there), pinning him up like a real model in various weather-related scenery. And it certainly makes sense: Marciano was the focus of Jossip’s own Journalust last year. But sorry, gays: Marciano is a heterosexual, said to be dating and living with co-anchor Veronica de la Cruz.

Below, one more beauty shot.

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Says Usher: “You will always be my boo.”

Says Anderson: “I wanna be your boo.”

Charming video below.

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We never bothered trying to watch CNN live from the network’s website. And it wasn’t because we had to install a special plug-in to catch the live stream. We just never noticed the option before. (Or noticed that it was free.)

So during a commercial break for MTV’s new Legally Blonde reality series, we tuned in to CNN on the TV. It was in the middle of a commercial break.

But on CNN.com’s live webcam stream, we got Anderson Cooper! Live! From the backside!

Aaron Brown, who was removed from CNN to make room for Anderson Cooper in 2005, quietly ran out the remainder of his contract behind the scenes. Now that his tenure there is up, he’s moving to PBS, and he gave New York his exit interview, where they asked: “Do you have psychic scars from CNN?”

Replied Brown: “Mostly I laugh about it. In my time there, they paid me to go away, they paid Connie Chung probably a lot to go away, they paid Paula Zahn to go away.”

Funny, because Greta Van Susteren, who also left CNN, had an entirely different experience. She, in essence, paid them.

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So who’s the CNN human resources head that Early Show No. 2 Michael Rosen is marrying? She’s Jane Caplan, and her reputation certainly precedes her.

We’re told that on more than one occasion, Caplan allegedly has interviewed CBS staffers looking for a new gig at CNN, and then passed that information back the tiffany network, where Rosen would have a chance to either a) fire the CBS staffer; b) trash the staffer’s reputation at CNN, thus killing any chance they could be hired away. One horror story retold to us went down exactly like Scenario B. But interestingly, another source says Caplan’s information trading scored them promotions, having been able to leverage the wrongdoings into better jobs. (Neither Caplan nor Rosen responded to requests for comment.)

But don’t think the Rosen-Caplan duo is the only information funnel that has CBS types worried.

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The news outlets – CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, along with the Associated Press – usually split the bill for National Election Pool polling results, which provide the data for the super-duper touch screens that John King is so fond of on primary nights.

But back in April, NEP reps decided not to set up polling for Sunday’s Puerto Rico Democratic primary. Perhaps it’s because, while Puerto Ricans get to vote in the Democratic primary, their political status means they don’t get to vote in the actual presidential election. Or perhaps because they have finally stopped giving Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt. Or perhaps they’re racist! Whatever.

Then things kind of changed: The Democratic primary race became one of the most closely contested in recent memory, making every delegate’s vote worthwhile. But only one network reversed course and decided to find out the island nation’s results before official filings come in. So CNN is footing the bill all by itself, paying an estimated $100,000 to have people on the ground at polling places. [THR]

And once they’ve broadcast their exit polling analysis to all over America, expect MSNBC, FNC, and all the rest of ‘em to repeat that data without paying a penny.

CNN’s Jessica Yellin, who on Anderson Cooper’s show last night revealed she had felt pressure from above to “patriotize” her news reports when covering the Bush White House and the Iraq war, has now clarified her remarks as promised. For one, she clears up that she was talking about ABC, where she used to work, but MSNBC, of all places, where she “worked as a segment producer, overnight anchor, field reporter, and briefly covered the White House, the Pentagon, and general Washington stories.” And also: It wasn’t like Jeff Immelt was ringing her extension to tell her to draw hearts around Bush’s photos.

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