Hearst Story on Waxman Committee Dropping the Ball on WWE Investigation Is Unimportant – Just Take Dave Meltzer’s Word for It (3rd in a series)

PREVIOUSLY:

Introducing “WWE Responds to Hearst’s Story on the Abortive Waxman Committee Steroid Investigation” (1^st in a series)

WWE Corporate Flack Is One of the Hardest Jobs in America (2nd in a series)

“The Hearst chain of newspapers in Connecticut promised a major story regarding steroids in wrestling and the Linda McMahon campaign on 2/28. The story isn’t going to have any effect,” proclaims Dave Meltzer in the new March 10 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

Meltzer’s point – and I think he thinks he has one – is that there is no purpose served in reporting that a government investigation started and stopped, without a clear resolution.

Meltzer also presumes to tell Hearst what the parameters of its own story should have been. There is nothing, it seems, nothing, unless reporter Brian Lockhart committed himself to analyzing, chapter and verse, each and every one of the preliminary findings of Henry Waxman. (In January 2009, 13 months after conducting closed-door staff interviews with Vince and Linda McMahon and other WWE officials, the outgoing chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform punted a thousand pages of transcripts and background documents to the White House Office on Drug Control Policy – thereupon to be stuffed inside a drawer and forgotten.)

Uh, I don’t think I agree with you on this one, Dave.

Lest I be accused of quoting Meltzer out of context, here is his complete account in the Observer:

The Hearst chain of newspapers in Connecticut promised a major story regarding steroids in wrestling and the Linda McMahon campaign on 2/28. The story isn’t going to have any effect. It never even addressed really any facts of the situation that would be potentially hard for McMahon to answer, never mentioning the time line of starting and stopping testing, any conclusions the Henry Waxman committee made regarding the program, nor the preponderance of young deaths of wrestlers. Instead, it was just about how if the government had investigated WWE that Linda’s campaign would be worse off for it. Well, duh. The story noted that the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which Waxman wrote to regarding continuing an investigation, has done nothing. Waxman’s office told the papers he no longer considers the subject his responsibility, even though the Energy and Commerce Committee, which he chairs, has looked at the subject of steroids. It noted that once Henry Waxman sent a letter early last year to the Office of National Drug Control Policy urging an investigation on steroid use in wrestling, since his own term as chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was ending. A spokesperson for Tom Davis, the top ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said, “The focus on the steroid investigation left with Chairman Waxman when he went to Energy and Commerce.”

Next: A couple of Waxman Committee documents for your perusal

Irv Muchnick