For over 40 years, Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter has been one of the primary sources of behind-the-scenes news in professional wrestling.
While the industry has grown and evolved, Meltzer is still seen as a major figure in the landscape.
Sunday on Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer spent nearly a half-hour dissecting a recent story involving WWE Chief Content Creator Paul “Triple H” Levesque’s reaction to a question asked at a post-show press conference following May 4’s Backlash France Premium Live Event.
The question, which regarded allegations made by former WWE and UFC champion Ronda Rousey about WWE wrestler Drew Gulak, was met with hostility and defensiveness by Levesque. There, he went out of his way to diminish Fightful and PWInsider, two respected wrestling news sites.
Levesque reportedly reached out to Mike Johnson and Sean Ross Sapp, reporters with PWInsider and Fightful respectively, and apologized privately. Both men tweeted about the apology, which Meltzer disagreed with.
“I just thought that it was, like, ‘We have to tell everyone that they like us!’ But they’re not supposed to like you. If you’re doing a good job, they don’t like you.
“They’ll put up with if you’re good enough and you’re important enough, but you don’t want to be their friend. You don’t want to be their enemy just to be their enemy, but I just thought there was this idea that ‘Oh we have to make sure everyone knows they still like us.'”
The veteran reporter then turned his attention back to the reporter who asked the question in the first place, 21-year-old Lucas Charpiot.
“He’s had a ringer of a week. 21 years old, I actually asked him to do the show today, but he did a show with John Pollock and Brandon Thurston and got even more negativity.
“People just got on his case. That’s the other aspect of it. If you’re going to do this, you better be able to handle this negativity. You can’t survive if you can’t handle the negativity. But this poor guy just asked a question and he’s made to be the villain and he’s not the villain of anything.”
Meltzer then launched into a discussion about the industry, at large.
“If you defend AEW, they say you must be on the payroll. But most of these people, how can I put this, the same thing could happen in AEW and WWE, or worse, and the reaction would be very very different. The Vince McMahon lawsuit, for example, there were people who wrote about it over and over, but there are people, even in WWE, who go ‘Well, everyone’s over it now.’
“Of course they are. They just want a seat at the table instead of trying to look at the big issues and the real stories. There are very few [media members] who want to be adversarial. They want to be friends, and you can’t be.”
Meltzer brings up an interesting point. Professional wrestling falls somewhere between sports and entertainment. The predetermined outcomes make it difficult to cover as one would cover a sport like football or baseball, and that leads to a smaller crop of people who are covering it.
So when an actual real-life issue pops up, reporters are faced with a tough decision. That includes whether they should investigate further and risk upsetting the status quo, or wait for someone else to do the dirty work and continue to enjoy the access to talent and events.
When UFC first was getting popular, Meltzer noticed a change in media where there was a dearth of “real media” leading to website reporters who may or may not have had a journalistic background. That led to those people becoming some of the key members of UFC media. He says that wrestling is experiencing something similar.
“MMA, like with wrestling, unlike with the NBA or NHL or baseball where you have a whole group of people who have done it and are legendary in their first, MMA was a start-up, just like wrestling. The top reporters weren’t covering wrestling. It was so much about wanting to be friends and not wanting to say anything negative.
“It’s like WrestleJoy. We only want to publish the good stuff, we don’t want to dwell on the bad stuff. I watch the WWE pressers, and when they had the pre-show conference calls I was on a lot of them. As soon as they said who the person was, there were seven or eight people that I knew it would be a good question, and if it wasn’t one of them there would be these questions that made me gag.”
With professional wrestling in the midst of another boom period, it would be refreshing for both media members and executives alike to both be on the same page with regards to transparency.
