Oops! Now Gawker is saying Ford crack video may be "gone"

Or maybe it just didn't exist in the first place?

This is an interesting development that may do permanent damage to The Toronto Star, which invested its credibility, such as it was, on unnamed sources with highly discreditable backgrounds.

As for Gawker, how reliable is someone whose unbiased journalistic opinion proclaims:

" Rob Ford...is a conservative and a racist buffoon"

Gawker's editor John Cook  "reports":

when the intermediary called to tell me that he had finally heard from the owner. And his message was: "It's gone. Leave me alone." It was, the intermediary told me, a short conversation.

UPDATE: The Toronto Star reveals its secret strategic model for trapping Rob Ford: