Boca Raton Paper Screws Up WWE Storyline

Wrestling And Reporters Are Tricky Mix In Vince McMahon Story

Newspaper editors rarely ask potential reporters if they’re up on the latest pro wrestling storylines.

After a recent story in the Boca Raton News, maybe they should.

The paper reported on the alleged misconduct by World Wrestling Entertainment Chairman Vince McMahon, who has been accused by a tanning salon employee of groping her and trying to kiss her late last month in Florida.

But the final line of the story claimed that McMahon was “reportedly” seeking a divorce from his wife, Linda McMahon, the CEO of WWE.

A Press search showed no recent reports about divorce proceedings. As it turns out, the explanation is that the paper mixed up real life and pro wrestling drama.

In late 2000, as part of a storyline, Vince McMahon asked his wife for a divorce on TV after she sided with Long Island native and then-WWE Commissioner Mick Foley on a matchmaking decision. It was all for show and television ratings, but apparently no one at the Boca Raton News knew the difference.

When Boca Raton News Co-Editor John Johnston was contacted by the Press, he noted that his paper wasn’t the only media outlet to make the error. He explained that the reporter who wrote the story had heard the erroneous divorce report from local television stations and included it in his story. He added that the paper would not be running a correction because it’s impossible to define what is real and what isn’t when it comes to wrestling.

“You can do a correction on a fact, not on a farce,” Johnston says.

Such comments irritate Dave Scherer, a reporter and editor with the Pro Wrestling Insider website (www.pwinsider.com), who counters that the attitude a paper takes about a wrestling story often causes it to make errors.

“The problem is that too many reporters in the mainstream media treat wrestling as a joke and therefore don’t fact-check the way that they would for what they consider a ‘real’ story,” Scherer maintains. “It’s pretty obvious to me that they don’t care about their journalistic integrity when they repeatedly ‘report’ information that isn’t true, make no effort to check their facts and then never correct their mistakes after the fact.”

In fairness to the BRN, this isn’t the first time the media has confused reality and ruse as it relates to the squared circle. Mike Mooneyham, a longtime pro wrestling columnist for the Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier, tells of the time several years ago when the legendary “Nature Boy” Ric Flair was competing for the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling and faked a heart attack as part of a storyline.

“The next day it was widely reported on the local media that Flair had suffered a heart attack,” Mooneyham remembers. “Granted, there wasn’t much time for verification, but the angle was played out so realistically that some of the media bit. One local sports guy here in Charleston did call my house the next evening to corroborate the incident. When my wife told him I was out of town—at a Christmas party with Ric—he knew he had been had.”

Scott Libin, a member of the Leadership & Management Faculty at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., opines that the Boca Raton News story could have included a more detailed explanation of the divorce report. That could have absolved a reporter no matter how little knowledge he or she had of the grappling profession.

“Journalists should, to the extent they can, confine themselves to objective, verifiable fact,” Libin says. “I can imagine a report that said, ‘In 2000, McMahon said during WWE broadcasts that he and his wife would be getting a divorce, but we can find no court record that he ever took any actual legal steps toward dissolving his marriage.’”

He adds, “Not knowing much about pro wrestling is no excuse for not getting the facts straight.”

Other than a few notable exceptions—like Mooneyham and Alex Marvez of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel—there is a dearth of print reporters in America who have a background covering pro wrestling. So, fans usually have to turn to the few websites that are considered the benchmarks for providing accurate wrestling news (namely, www.pwinsider.com, www.1wrestling.com and www.wrestlingobserver.com).

But those sites have had their hands tied by WWE, which for years has refused to comment to websites because the ’Net journalists often are trying to divulge news about how storylines will progress, and the politics that are going on backstage.

Would it benefit WWE to work closely with these established websites, since with their knowledge of the wrestling business they would likely never make the kind of mistake the media in Florida did?

Mooneyham certainly thinks so.

“[The above sites] are all respectable—and journalistic,” Mooneyham says. “To not acknowledge them as such is a major underestimation on the part of WWE. WWE has tried in recent months to make its own website more ‘inside’ to its fans. And, to an extent, it has.

“But you’ve got to realize that some negative news just won’t see the light of day. And it’s not like most of these wrestling journalists are trying to bury WWE. In most cases, they’re extremely fair. They’re just calling them like they see them. And sometimes the truth hurts.”