Comic Book Television
June 29th, 2007The Ultimate Warrior will be featured on FOX News’ Hannity and Colmes tonight. I’ll tell you right now: Warrior is a maniac and everybody knows it. He might have something valuable to say about himself and steroids (he is, I’m sure, a former if not present steroid user) but whatever he says about the WWE or the wrestling industry should be taken with a grain of salt as he was exiled from the business for his cockamamie beliefs and erratic behavior.
You might take that with a grain of thought and say, “Greg Pratt has a problem with the Warrior and is just trying to smear him before he tells the truth!” but if you say that, you’re fooling yourself. He is a man who changed his legal name to Warrior (just Warrior) because he wanted to own, and be, his character; he’s been involved in numerous pay disputes with the WWE and has been dismissed several times from the organization; he’s written a comic book about himself; he recently said, about an autobiographical book he’s writing, “I’m not interested in detailing the seedy underbelly of an industry I have no desire to be associated with.” So why is he speaking about an industry that he’s been out of for so long?
Because he wants to smear the wrestling world. Why is FOX giving him air-time? Two reasons: they want to smear the wrestling world (obviously) and Warrior is a Conservative commentator in the same realm as Ann Coulter. He famously declared, “Queering doesn’t make the world work!” and that’s about the extent of his intellectual thought. If you go to his website, you’ll find endless, meaningless babble.
There’s nothing wrong with reporters speaking to wrestlers about steroids, but don’t mislead the world by presenting clowns like the Ultimate Warrior as credible sources.
There’s news on the Benoit-crime front: he was drinking, as several empty cans were found next to his dead body. That tells me that Benoit wasn’t right, as do all his drugs, and I eagerly await his toxicology report. Geraldo Rivera, upon hearing that Benoit had been drinking when he killed himself (if not when he killed his family), decided to kick a few back himself. How else can you explain the following, which is from his latest appearance on the O’Reilly Factor and is the most shameless, opportunistic bit of poor reporting that I’ve ever read. O’Reilly, Rivera and their producers should all lose their jobs for not doing any amount of fact-checking before letting him go on the air with this dribble.
Gerlado Rivera was a guest analyst on The O’Reilly Factor tonight and made a huge mistake in trying to create a conspiracy because he mistakenly believed that Sherri Martel and Nancy Benoit died on the same day, then loosely tied Sherri with Nancy’s ex-husband, Kevin Sullivan (whom he didn’t mention by name) and said she was his “booker,” whatever that means. He then managed to get wrong the dates of the text messages, saying they took place on Sunday night during the PPV.
Mid-discussion, Geraldo moved to the Wikipedia posting at midnight on Sunday. He said it could have been by chance, a hoax by someone making it up. [It was. If you haven’t heard, someone posted over the weekend before the cops knew that Benoit was dead. Turns out it was an unfortunate hoax.] He said another coincidence is that Chris kills his wife on Friday, June 15 or Saturday, June 16 and that Sherri Martel also died of unnatural causes related to drug use. He said she is another woman connected to these pro wrestlers. He said Sherri knew Nancy’s ex-husband.
He asked if the posting was made by a WWE official, “they were obviously in communication with Chris Benoit.” He said it was alleged that Benoit was text messaging his friends as he was watching a wrestling event he was supposed to be at in Texas. “The Feds have to subpoena every single electronic communication,” he said. “I think this is going to be gigantic.” He wondered if it was bigger than a murder-murder-suicide. O’Reilly said (completely off-topic), “If they can prove steroid abuse was ordered by the top guys in the wrestling federation, they’ll arrest them.” Geraldo asked, “What if you can prove everybody in town knows whatever everybody is doing and do nothing. Now it’s a little less clear as to their criminal liability, but I think you’ve definitely got a story here that will affect professional wrestling in a profound way.”
Earlier in the discussion, Geraldo said: “I think there is going to be increased scrutiny of WWE… in the steroid abuse of the people who are their actors in this entertainment venture. There is obviously great athleticism. They know about their heavy steroid use.” He brought up the raids on Chris Benoit’s doctor and internet pharmacy. He said WWE tried to downplay the steroid involvment and place the blame on Chris or Nancy arguing over the care of their child. “What a bunch of bunk that was,” he said. “They were trying intentionally to deflect the public’s attention from this steroid use.”
The last sentence is right and wrong. Of course the wrestling world doesn’t want to pour gasoline on the steroids did this! fire but the idea that there was a huge domestic dispute is not far-fetched in the least. Other than that, Rivera made an idiot out of himself and the people who watch Fox News now believe that the WWE is covering up its knowledge of the murder-suicides (and, perhaps, involvement) along with a bunch of crazy ideas that Geraldo made up about Benoit’s wife and ex-husband.
Journalism is as journalism has been for the last ten years.