My Wish for Wrestling Journalism

(This is sort of the unofficial second part of an unofficial two-part post from earlier today.)

Wrestling journalism is sometimes considered an oxymoron, and for good reason. The amount of stories that come out as untrue or at least partially true is staggering compared to other fields of reporting excepting maybe the celeb gossip rags. Even then, you'd expect publications that report on which celebrity is shacking up with what other celebrity to rely on rumors, hearsay and whispers down the lane. However, the fact that kind of reporting passes for the majority of what most wrestling news sites publish is sad to me.

Photo Credit: WWE.com

In such a carny industry, it can be argued that rumors are the only means of reporting, that everything is so secretive that future plans and such, that every rumor needs to be jumped upon, regardless of the fact that plans change almost all the time in the big companies. However, whoever said that reporting only had to consist of future plans? Whatever happened to reporting on things that already happened, reacting and analyzing them and trying to make sense of the past rather than decode the future?

More often than not, rumors snowball into avalanches of half-truths and plans that never come to fruition. Where do these rumors come from? Usually nebulous "sources" within TNA or WWE. It's almost never a primary source, much like in the same case with all the Punk stuff today as astutely pointed out by K. Sawyer Paul. Again, jobs are on the line, so it's hard to pinpoint a primary source. Therefore, if you can't get a good primary source on things that may happen, then why report on it at all?

Of course, I've been guilty of this in the past. My Bryan Danielson source, which to me was a primary one, but again, he was only getting things from Danielson himself about stuff Creative "had planned" for him, only for it to be changed over and over again. I mean, I need not remind you of that big "scoop" I had placing Danielson and Evan Bourne in a then-future tag team. We all know how that turned out.

However, those sources can be crucial for sorting out things that did happen, why things happened. OR maybe journalists can look at things that happened and use critical deduction from available media that have been disseminated to try and give people accounts of why things happened rather than giving the shocking spoiler plans that may or may not happen.

Now, I doubt this will ever happen. There's always going to be a demand for knowing what's going to happen before it's going to happen, and then looking smarter than the people watching rapt with no notion of what's about. If it wasn't, then site after site that comes up reporting every little thing that gets rumored would not exist. However, they don't call it a wish for nothing. It might be hoping against hope, but I'd rather see more sites to analysis, reaction and focusing on things that have happened rather than things that might happen.

While we're at it, I'd love for those sites by and large to get rid of the pop-up ads and insidious malware, but hey, I'll settle for trenchant, real reporting first.

Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!