I'm not going to name and shame any particular websites or writers, partially for potential libel reasons if any of them were to see this and get a major case of butthurt, but also because there's really no way to tell where the lies start. It's unclear if it's genuine misinformation that they just report knowing full well it's unverified, whether their (mostly always unnamed) "sources" are the liars, or whether they just make up the sources entirely. Since all the top websites also have a nasty habit of copying and pasting content from each other it's hard to pin down where faux stories originated. Often Meltzer and his "sources" are credited, I don't think David Meltzer is a liar but he's wrong just as often as he's right and gets far more credibility in terms of HOT BACKSTAGE RUMOURS than he deserves.
The point of this post is to demonstrate how worthless of a source these wrestling websites are, to the extent that most fans would be better off simply ignoring them entirely. Whether the misinformation is intentional or not is irrelevant (I personally believe it is more often than not) but the lack of faith you can place in this form of journalism certainly is.
Here's a quick personal anecdote to get you in the right frame of mind for what comes after. I was helping with updates on a popular wrestling pages Facebook page once upon a time, at that time this particular page has about 80,000 fans and a reach of over a quarter million, that's not a bad chunk of the Internet Wrestling Community to have on board. One day I posted a link to a new article from Kayfabe News that I thought was especially entertaining. One of the fellow members of the team saw this and had never heard of Kayfabe News before, and decided he was now a big fan, and thanked them for their work by going onto their website...to copy and paste entire articles and post them directly on the page itself.
Not the link, the actual text from their website directly posted onto the Facebook page itself without context or credit. So obviously some morons on the page thought it was real news (for those that don't know, Kayfabe News is basically the wrestling equivalent of The Onion), some smarter people caught on they were joke articles and praised the page as such, and there was a handful of voices pointing out that it was just stolen from Kayfabe News. I bitterly thought with the head Administrator of the page to knock this off and either post the links or stop posting their content entirely, it took about 1-2 hours of argument to reach a compromise where they would continue to do what they were doing but put a little "From Kayfabe News" in brackets at the very BOTTOM of the post, so still no acknowledge of their actual website in any shape or form.
Needless to say, I stopped working for these people very soon after this, and also walking away from the biggest audience I've ever published in front of. The point is, these people in charge of an extremely popular wrestling page not only didn't mind intentionally stealing other peoples content, taking it out of context and presenting it as the truth, but I had to argue with them for hours to force them to concede any fault whatsoever. They are cretins, they are worthless dog turds in terms of being people and of being journa..no, they're not journalists. They're twats. Twats with keyboards who lucked into an audience. And before anyone starts accusing me of hypocrisy, I'll have you know I haven't got to the "lucked into an audience" part yet.
ANYWAY, on to the business at hand.
In what I consider to be a really boring story, it is being reported across the board in the online wrestling world that AJ Lee is majorly in the doghouse with WWE officials because she "chewed out" some TV personality called Michelle Beadle who was part of their annual Tribute to the Troops show. This all happened last Wednesday (11th December 2013).
Here is a snippet from a wrestling website chosen at random on how this story was ORIGINALLY reported:
"According to a source, Lee saw NBC personality Michelle Beadle (who was on hand hosting the event) chatting with CM Punk backstage at the event and "freaked out." More specifically, Lee threw an obscenity-laced tired at the popular television personality. As you know, AJ and Punk are dating in real-life."The article goes on to explain that Beadle confirmed that some kind of incident did occur on her Twitter account, insisting twice that WWE officials were there and she took it to be "a joke". Later in the very same article we get this little tidbit.
"Judging by that tweet, it sounds like AJ may have gotten jealous of Beadle talking/flirting with her boyfriend CM Punk. That is NOT confirmed though. We hope to have more shortly. "Let's be brief here because it's probably fair to say that most people are familiar enough with the methods of certain journalisms to see what's going on here for themselves. This is a hell of a leap by the writer, the article is painting the most dramatic and most interesting picture it possibly can with the limited information, and the "THIS IS NOT CONFIRMED" line attached to it ironically confirms that this is just made up. When you subtly add in that interoperation of a breaking story you are going to make the audience think that and the writer absolutely knows this, it doesn't matter if you put NOT CONFIRMED in bold after it, that's what you're saying and that's want people to think. This is a get-out clause for later when the story does develop and it's basically guaranteed that this isn't even remotely true. But it makes for a juicy story now.
The story was updated later the same day with the following:
"Responding to an upset AJ Lee fan on Twitter, Beadle remarked, "Hon...it was done in front of company people. I didn't say a word. I thought it was a joke." Beadle's tweet gels our report, as we noted on the podcast that Lee's Tribute to the Troops incident took place in front of many important people."Oh, it 'gels your report' does it? The fact that she confirmed the fact that other people were there and saw something happen between her and AJ Lee does not confirm anything about the "jealousy" you mentioned in the last report, or the abuse that AJ was allegedly making. The fact that your early report got one of the basic facts vaguely, vaguely correct does that confirm your credibility to comment on this story.
Another thing to mention at this point, this report has also contained a prediction that AJ Lee will probably lose the Divas title at Tables, Ladders and Chairs which happened this past weekend. More on that later.
The third report is where things start getting interesting, by this point the website has retracted all the dumb stuff it made up about jealousy and confirmed that AJ Lee didn't confront Michelle Beadle during a conversation with CM Punk, but rather Beadle had talked to Punk earlier in the day and confronted her later on without Punk present. So by the third reports admission, the first two reports were worthless dribble. Now, you might now make the very fair point that in this modern Twitter based world of journalism where everything is updated around the clock it would be unreasonable to suggest that these sites hold off from reporting an incident entirely due to not having all the facts...and you'd be right.
But the important part of this is to note that not having any facts didn't stop them from building their narrative. It is a well known structured narrative in backstage gossip that AJ Lee (along with Dolph Ziggler) are in trouble with WWE management, they took what little they knew about this story and not only reported it in a way that made AJ look as unprofessional as possible, but they tried to use their own narrative as evidence for a Pay-Per-View prediction. It's all a desperate struggle for credibility, they make up stuff they don't know, use that stuff to put a story in your mind, and then use that story to speculate on WWE storylines so now you think you're in the loop.
NOW, you'll be sitting there with your friends watching the PPV talking about how "AJ will probably lose because she's in trouble backstage and I'm smart and stuff". These sites know that smarks love that, they crave that, and they will lie and manipulate reports to give you that, and that is the danger of reading these horrible websites. Because even if a totally reliable report comes out that AJ really didn't do anything wrong whatsoever, this image is burned into your mind, there's no way for her to come out of this well any more whatever she did.
Now, a spanner is thrown into the works when it turns out that a WRESTLER saw the whole thing and gives their (uncredited...as ever) account of what happened:
"One wrestler who witnessed the incident is denying the claim of Lee raising her voice and cursing at Beadle. "Anyone who said that is a liar," said the wrestler, who spoke under the condition of anonymity."So now we have ANOTHER narrative from an unnamed source that everything said up til now was a lie, and whoever the original source was made up a lot of stuff to make AJ look bad. We have a "source" that deduced that Punk talked to Beadle at some point of the way (they couldn't have possibly seen that conversation because no-one knows what Beadle actually said to him) and saw AJ kick down the door guns blazing and shot her mouth off and went crazy, and a "unnamed wrestler" who says none of that happened.
Already the waters have been muddied enough for us to not have a clue of what actually happened. The writer of the reports has already shown their contempt for the truth and the audience, and in terms of information we have two equally unreliable sources that completely disagree with each other. Note that none of these reports are comfortable in commenting on who was actually present for this incident, how many there were or who they were, they only mention the fact that there was at least SOMEONE there who was high ranking enough to get AJ in trouble for this...allegedly.
By the end of the third report, you get this lovely little paragraph:
"Many people within WWE are embarrassed and angry at Lee over the incident. She is expected to be disciplined for her behavior. As seen at WWE's TLC pay-per-view, AJ defeated Natalya and retained the title so they pulled the "swerve" that we hinted at earlier. We wouldn't be surprised to see a rematch on RAW or in the very near future."Even with developments that potentially show that everything you've said up to now is completely wrong, the writer re-confirms the anti-AJ narrative, and acknowledges that as it turns out AJ didn't actually lose the title at TLC as their last report predicted. But it's okay, they weren't "wrong" they just didn't do it because it's a "swerve". Yea, the WWE creative team were changing things up last minute in direct response to them...or something. There's no humility here, any misinformation is just a "development in the story", patched up so this website can drag you along on this rollercoaster of lies and still come out of it with as much credibility as possible.
Things get even more complicated though! Just for old times sake, let's nab a quote from Bleacher Report on another development!
"Meanwhile over at WrestlingNewsWorld, Richard Grey has dismissed the story entirely, claiming Lee had merely been told to cut a scripted promo on Beadle backstage for the WWE app, only Beadle and no one else around were actually aware the whole thing was a work."I'm sorry what now?
Personally, I have no opinion on what actually happened, mostly because based on the information available it is impossible to determinate what happened and unlike these websites I don't claim to know...also it's boring and who cares. Let's recap what we have though, these are the four narratives:
- AJ went up and mouthed off at Beadle while in a conversation with Punk out of jealousy.
- AJ talked to Beadle after the Punk conversation and WENT NUTS.
- AJ talked to Beadle after the Punk conversation and didn't go nuts.
- AJ went nuts, but it was all scripted and planned but no-one knew about it.
This. Is. Impossible.
I don't mean that it's impossible for all four narratives to be true...well, I do, but I mean it's impossible for these four misconceptions to happen. Either AJ was being abusive and using profanity...or she wasn't, there's no "source opinion" on that, it's a yes or no answer. The complete lack of sources and lack of key and mysteriously basic information on all four narratives makes all of them unreliable.
Either this "unnamed wrestler" is completely for real and the original story was a lie, either this guy is a liar (or maybe someone just made this up), or as for the WWE App theory, Michelle Beadle is a liar. The WWE App theory is actually kind of scary, if someone made that up its the dumbest possible lie ever, I think that kind of lie has to be considering trolling like they were genuinely curious if someone would be dumb enough to post it. But if it's true, then in their unprofessionalism and lack of integrity the online wrestling news sites have unintentionally helped the WWE get a storyline super over by not only reporting their lie, but reinforcing it with their own resources and narrative.
Again, which one is true, if any, whether anyone lied or not is all irrelevant. By this point of this story's development, my argument has been made.
Whether it's because of their own lack of ability to distinguish reality from showbusiness, lack of ability to get reliable sources, or lack of ability to be good writers and journalists, the stuff you read on these websites is GARBAGE. It's about as reliable as just making up your own rumours and sharing them on social media, hey guess what, consider this as extension of my personal anecdote from the beginning of this post; PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO THAT.
If your curiousity really does take you online and you feel the urge to keep yourself in the loop, please don't forget the mountains of salt required. The ONLY fact of this story is AJ Lee had a conversation with Michelle Beadle, that's it. Literally all we can say based on the evidence, motivations, tone, consequences, as much as these sites refuse to admit it...is all conjecture.
Consider this a public service announcement against these horrible websites, their content is rubbish and so are the majority of the content creators. It's all a narrative, it's all (bad) entertainment in itself, they don't know nearly as much as they claim to and stories like this will always show that for people willing to pay attention, and they DO flat out lie sometimes.
Don't have nightmares.
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