Will Hearst Newspapers’ Linda McMahon Story Be a Game Changer?

Brian Lockhart of the Stamford Advocate and Hearst newspapers has filled a syringe with substance and injected it deep into the flabby gluteus maximus of Linda McMahon’s Senate campaign.

The heavily promoted front-page investigative piece was not released online. Eventually there should be a full-text link, and I’ll provide one when I have it.

The headline has, in small capital letters, “FIZZLED STEROID-ABUSE INVESTIGATION MAY BE …,” followed by, in larger capital letters, “LINDA’S LUCKY BREAK.”

Here is Lockhart’s lead paragraph: “The White House and Congress dropped the ball in 2009 on an effort to investigate the use of steroids in professional wrestling — a lapse that represents a break for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment who is campaigning on her success as a businesswoman.”

Here is how Lockhart accurately quotes me at the end of his long story:

Irv Muchnick, a West Coast-based writer and blogger who will be in Stamford in March promoting a book on the [Chris] Benoit murder-suicide, called the responses by [Congressman Henry] Waxman and the [White House Office of National Drug Control Policy] to Hearst “hilarious.”

“It’s clear what’s going on here. They don’t want to do anything more with it,” Muchnick said. “You can see what a joke the dance of the government bureaucrats on this.

Muchnick said Waxman’s report is a very good document that could lay the groundwork for a future investigation of WWE but he said the California Democrat should have stuck with the issue this past year.

“They probably take on lots of things every year. Some they pursue all the way, some they drop altogether,” Muchnick said. “And some wind up in the middle with a castigating report that doesn’t mean much at the end of the day because it gets stuffed into a drawer.”

Once the full text of the article is available, I’ll comment more fully on it.

But today is a day for readers in Connecticut to read it for themselves and process a lot of new information, and for congratulating Brian Lockhart on an excellent job.

Irv Muchnick