Wrestling Journalism - An Unethical Joke
A part of the industry that is screaming out for change
Wrestling journalism is a mockery of what journalism is supposed to be. To be completely blunt in what I mean, it is an industry that is full of cosplayers who are pretending to be ‘journalists’. It is full of clowns who want to be friends with billionaires, or who would rather get into arguments on Twitter instead of actually doing their jobs. What wrestling journalism is, is an industry that desperately needs change because the amount of truly great journalists in the wrestling industry are less than the amount of fingers I have on my right hand. There are very, very apparent problems that need to be addressed, and hopefully, there are solutions that can be worked towards as well.
The Blatant Issues of Wrestling Journalism
Ethics
The number of ethics varies depending on who you ask, but all journalists have a code of ethics that usually includes the basic principles of truth, objectivity, impartialness, and public accountability. Trying to find a journalist who follows the four principles I just listed in the wrestling industry is aimless because outside of a few, you simply will not. The one most wrestling journalists struggle with is impartialness. Many of them will claim not to have a bias towards any wrestling company but in the way they speak about them, they do, and it’s obvious. Whether it be AEW or WWE their bias is at the forefront of many of their tweets and it makes it difficult to treat anything they say like it has any sort of integrity. If the two companies were to make the exact same decision six months apart, some journalists would have extremely different reactions to both of them. “This is great for WWE, Paul Levesque has been such an important part of the uptake in business recently”, and “It makes no sense for AEW to be doing this, they should be trying to close the gap between them and WWE” is likely the phrases you would hear from them. I am not going to name any specific journalists throughout this, but I do not consider this person a journalist. Steve Carrier is a great example of breaking the journalist code of ethics. Clearly has a bias towards WWE, randomly tweets things such as “Britt Baker is cheating on Adam Cole with Christian Cage” with no truth behind it, and absolutely takes no accountability for his obviously false claims. Several journalists do not take accountability, if something they said was blatantly incorrect, or if you paid for a report that was already public knowledge they will deflect accountability. In some cases they will ignore it, and in other cases they will start Twitter arguments with you over it. It’s ridiculous, it’s unacceptable, it is unethical. We need objective journalism in professional wrestling more than ever in the time we’re currently in, and you would be hard pressed to find any journalist who intends to deliver on that.
Media Scrums
“Hey Tony, how did it feel to put on such a great show?”, “Hey Paul what would you say to all the detractors out there?”, “How did it feel to win the Ring of Honor world championship Claudio?” are all horrible questions that have been asked at recent media scrums. You are at a media scrum and your job is to pick talent or creative’s brain about what’s going on behind the scenes. You are not there to try to start an angle, you are not their friends, you are there to ask important questions. However, you would be surprised how little the amount of important questions asked are. So many journalists seem to be scared to ask these questions, possibly because they may not be invited to anymore media scrums if they do. So what? Paul Levesque is not your friend, Tony Khan is not your friend, these are rich billionaires running professional wrestling companies. If you are not invited back it looks worse on them than it does on you. WWE has been going through a season of Succession but is anyone at the Royal Rumble media scrum going to ask about that? Is anyone going to ask about how Vince McMahon (notable rapist) took back power? Of course not. Nobody wants to ask truly hard questions and it’s genuinely pathetic. A journalist is supposed to find out the truth, but wrestling journalists are scared of making their favorite company upset when it comes to trying to find it.
Behavior on Twitter
Journalists are supposed to be professionals, you would not know this if you were only involved in wrestling journalism. A truly great journalist in another industry is Adrian Wojnarowski. He is a basketball journalist who immediately tweets out big scoops when he hears about them. He does not use Twitter to argue with trolls, he doesn’t post eye emojis when he gets news. He just tweets scoops. Many basketball fans call them “Woj bombs” because of how sudden they are. Wojnarowski is greatly respected for how much of a professional he is and how little he holds back on NBA news like big trades, buyouts, or even breaking the NBA shutting down because of COVID-19. When wrestling journalists get a scoop, they will say “This is crazy….” and not tweet again for several hours, they will post emojis, they will do anything and everything except for actually posting about what’s happening. When @BigDawg17Chief replies “you suck and you smell” instead of ignoring it, wrestling journalists will quote retweet them and get into an extended argument with them. It’s an embarassment. These people are supposed to be professionals, they absolutely do not act like it.
The Solution
Many of the people reading this are not wrestling journalists, so it is actually pretty difficult to think of a solution from our perspective. One thing we can do is hold said wrestling journalists to higher standards. I get more scoops from my Twitter mutuals, and in Twitter spaces at three in the morning than I do from wrestling journalists. Hold them to be better, hold them to be more like Adrian Wojnarowski instead of like Steve Carrier. Hold them to actually act like they are journalists. Many will likely block you for it, but criticism is something they absolutely need to hear right now. They are not going to change themselves, many of them are happy being sent charcuterie by their favorite professional wrestling companies because they report positively on them. Fuck the charcuterie, and fuck making vague tweets when they get scoops, we need to strive for better journalism in this industry. We deserve better journalism in this industry. So, strive for it, ask for it, criticise these journalists until we have journalism we can be proud of. Professional wrestling is great, the journalism can be too.