I am a fan of WWE, and I have been for several years. I also acknowledge that WWE is the biggest company in professional wrestling, and that every other company in the world is competing for second place and a share of the audience. However, what really annoys me is when writers and broadcasters attempt to pass themselves off as “wrestling” journalists, when they are nothing more than shills for WWE.
New Japan Pro Wrestling held its first ever major show in the United States (ironically, on the same weekend that WWE held a show in Japan), and I read two reports on the show; one from Bleacher Report, and the other from Pro Wrestling Dot Net. The Dot Net piece covered the NJPW show as if it was a wrestling show, treating the show objectively, and comparing it only to other NJPW shows. On the other hand, the Bleacher Report piece made constant comparisons to WWE, and could not hide the writer’s WWE biases.
The BR coverage opened with the 10-Man match. The writer listed all of the combatants, and ended this portion by naming Rocky Romero and “former WWE jobber” Beretta. Clearly, the writer does not know much about NJPW or he would have known that Trent Baretta is a four-time IWGP Jr. Tag Title holder with Romero, and that Roppongi Vice (the team of Romero and Beretta) won the most recent New Japan Super Junior Tag Tournament. The writer closed his coverage of this match by noting the conversations about the Young Bucks “devaluing” the super-kick by overusing it (which most HBK/WWE fans have stated recently), and by mentioning Beretta’s “disappointing run in WWE” as opposed to just appreciating his work for New Japan.
From there, the writer wondered why Volador wasn’t in the WWE Cruiserweight Classic; he waxed about how good Bushi and Evil would be in the WWE Tag team division; then he talked about Zack Sabre from the CWC, and about how poorly WWE used Juice Robinson in NXT. Perhaps the most glaring shill for McMahon-land was when the writer noted that the eight-man match featuring Billy Gunn and Hiroshi Tanahashi “felt the most like a WWE match” that any of the previous matches on the card. Sadly, there was also a mention of how, after establishing himself in Japan, Yoshitatsu will probably end up on NXT or 205 Live very soon.
The final straws of this report were the comments of how War Machine looked like WWE tag teams from the 80s and 90s, and how if Cody Rhodes could get heat in WWE the way that he did in this show, management might have used him better, despite the fact that Cody had asked to be removed from the Stardust gimmick in order to start a feud with his brother Dustin (Goldust).
I appreciate that there is a difference between WWE fans and wrestling fans. Wrestling fans are people who can appreciate all wrestling objectively, while WWE fans look at other companies to see how they compare to WWE, or don’t bother to watch other companies at all, seeing them as inferior products. However, wrestling “journalists” should not shill for one product over another and compare everything that they see to that product because that is not objective journalism. If you are writing about WWE, then write about WWE, but if you are not writing about WWE, then leave WWE out of the report.
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