This morning, Fox broke away from Hurricane Irene coverage to discuss Gawker.

Fox says that Gawker, along with 7 other sites are "dead or dying." Blogger, MySpace, Bebo, Chatroulette, Digg, TypePad and Slashdot were also discussed.

"This popular gossip site's traffic has dropped 75 percent this year, according to Compete, and has wallowed in its own bad press over the years," Fox writes.

Gawker says the bashing is preemptive. It says it has been working on a story that will expose one of Fox's anchors.

"Firstly, Gawker's traffic is not down 75% this year. This chart shows that we had 68.2 million pageviews as of August 24, as opposed to something just north of 40 million at the same time a year prior...Secondly: I [John Cook] have for several weeks been working on a story about a Fox News personality that Fox News really does not want published! Fox knows what the story is, because I've asked its PR department for comment (they refused)."

This isn't the first time Gawker and Fox have fought. Gawker previously wrote that Fox's News chief is a maniac, and Fox retorted that the site is a lousy joke.

Update: An earlier version of this story included a quote from former Gawker writer Foster Kamer. Foster says the quote was taken out of context. It wasn't crucial to this story so we removed it.