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After reading your Q and A on Monday about Dave Meltzer’s constant jabs at CM Punk, it go me thinking. I have noticed that there are a number outlets online who seem to attack Punk no matter what he does. I saw one site rip Punk for apologizing to the Saudi people. A grown man apologized for something that he should have never said, and they make him the bad guy???? I must be missing something. Can you fill me in on why these people feel and act the way that they do towards Punk?
I can do my best from my point of view, which has been formed over decades. I should state up front that I did pay for Meltzer’s newsletter for a few years when I heard about it in the now long-defunct The National back in the early 1990s and then tired of it due to the way he covered the business and canceled my subscription. I did get to know him and contributed to his newsletter but cut off my relationship with him around the time that I started The Wrestling Lariat in 1995. As I stated before, I started the Lariat because I would see things in his sheet that I knew first hand were not true so I lost faith in what he was reporting. I no longer wanted to be associated with him after he listed my name in the contributor section of his sheet and it led to people I knew in the business thinking I was “reporting” the things which were not true that he printed in his sheet. A clean break was needed. With that said, here goes.
Once upon a time, in a land that I wished was far, far away, there was a newsletter writer named Dave Meltzer. Meltzer clearly had a love for the Japanese style of wrestling, which of course was different from what the WWF and WCW was doing. I loved it too and wrote a column in the now-defunct Chairshots covering both Japanese wrestling and lucha libre. I gravitated to those genres since the US national business was so bad at the time. But, I always loved the US product, when done correctly, far more. The problem is that no one was doing that nationally in the early 90s. The difference here is that I was waiting for a good US product while Meltzer preferred the aforementioned style.
Meltzer also had a love for MMA and while a legitimate contest had no correlation to a worked match, Meltzer began covering that business in his pro wrestling newsletter. His reporting showed his preferences with extensive coverage of a niche version of pro wrestling and a business that wasn’t even pro wrestling. As the writer/editor, he pushed his preferences on his readers, which those that stayed with him were clearly receptive to as many of them felt the same way about the business as he did. That style of writing is understandable because I have done the same thing when I pen opinion pieces, though I would NEVER make the comment that he did claiming that Punk’s apology was a set up because I never, ever act as if my opinion is a fact. That is another of the many ways in which Meltzer and I are different.
For many years, he was looked at as the premium source for wrestling news by many people. The average fan didn’t have the view behind the curtain that I received when I started covering the business so I believe that many of them read the confident, authoritative way that Meltzer wrote his sheet and they believed everything that they read in it. I also think that his love of move based/workrate intensive wrestling, with storylines and character development being secondary at best, appealed to a subset of the fan base that I call the slide rule fans. In a nutshell, they think like he does.
One of the tones of his sheet was always that the style of wrestling that he liked was better than what WCW and The WWF were doing and if only that style would come to the US, it would be a massive success and show the world that he was right about what the best kind of pro wrestling is. He had a right to that opinion, for sure, but it was always something that would never be challenged since it seemed like it would never happen, especially after WCW went down.
And then, AEW came along.
It was everything that Meltzer said would prove his hypothesis on what the business should be and the people were going to see it and see how right he was about what he had been fawinng over for years. AEW became his new MMA/Japanese wrestling and he covered it with zeal. He was a, if not the, go-to reporter for AEW news since it was something he liked so much and he had a lot of connections there including Tony Khan, who read his work for years and was elated when he won Booker Of The Year in Meltzer’s year end polls.
AEW started out pretty strongly and then, it hit a lull. Tony Khan made the smart business decision to coax CM Punk out of retirement and after he debuted, business picked back up for AEW. Win/win!
Except it wasn’t, at least for some people.
Childish animosity started with some of the wrestlers who didn’t like Punk being in the company. I have no idea what their issues were with him. By most accounts, Punk was fine to work with when he came in, and many wrestlers said so publicly once the attack rumors started making their way into friendly reporting outlets. Then the incidents started.
Adam Page went off script and shot on Punk on national TV. Fair outlets like this one reported Page’s actions and called him out for it. Other AEW favorable outlets? Well, they did not. They ignored it completely, I would guess because it didn’t fit the narrative that they were creating for Punk.
The most famous blatant lie, and the one that brought all of the backstage sabotage of his character to a head, was that "Punk was keeping Colt Cabana off of TV". Now, despite the fact that anyone with a brain would have realized that Colt was already off of TV for months, save one random match, these outlets ran with the fake news that evil Punk was holding Cabana down (and they were proven wrong when even after Punk was gone, Colt stayed off of TV). My guess is that the people spreading the rumors to the house organ reporters did so because they liked Colt and he and CM Punk had their major fallout years ago. I can't report that as a fact, but it's an educated guess that they started attacking Punk because they were friends with Colt.
Tony Khan, to his detriment, did nothing to stop the smear campaign that had to be coming from his own locker room and was irking his top draw. Even though he could have called Meltzer and told him that the story was not true and ask him to put out a story saying that it was a lie, he didn’t do so to my knowledge. Also to my knowledge, Meltzer never called Khan (or Punk) to get their take on what was being reported, as other outlets reporting the lie probably didn’t do either.
It all came to a head at All Out with Punk’s infamous attack on the company, all while he was seated next to Khan. Finally, Khan stated at that press conference that the Colt story was a lie and that he should have addressed it sooner, but the damage was done and after Punk left the interview area, an encounter with him and The Young Bucks ensued backstage. Punk was suspended. He was also blamed as the person solely responsible for the situation getting to where it was by people like Meltzer.
Now to be clear, Punk was in the wrong to act the way he did at the press conference. 100 percent. Was he wrong in the locker room, when the altercation started after The Young Bucks entered his dressing room? I wasn’t there so I can’t say. But, to anyone who has integrity, Punk was not solely responsible for the situation. Whoever the people who called the receptive reporters and started spreading the lie are every bit as responsible. The Young Bucks were just as responsible as Punk for the backstage fight. In fact, fair people with integrity could argue that they were MORE responsible as not only did they enter the room and precipitate the encounter, as officers in the company they should be held to a higher standard to deescalate the situation, which they most certainly didn’t do.
Despite the fact that Punk was clearly not 100 percent responsible for what happened, the narrative from Meltzer and people who think like him said that he was.
Once Punk left, AEW's business dropped off. That led to a brief return, but once again the issues that the select group in the locker room had with him led to Jack Perry facing off with Punk and Punk being fired.
Those jaded outlets again talked about how out of control Punk was. Khan went on TV and said he was "scared for his life" as he was right there when Punk got into it with Perry backstage. Those outlets seized on the situation and again ostracized and blamed Punk completely. Fair outlets found fault on everyone for their actions but the people you refer to did not.
Of course, later we all saw the truth was nothing like the fiction that was reported about the brief encounter as the footage showed that Punk's encounter with Perry was largely benign. The only justifiable reason Khan could have had to be scared for his life was that he knew he was probably going to fire his top guy, which is what he did, and it would crater his business.
Since that time, AEW’s business has largely gone downward in the major business indicators (attendance, ratings, etc, though their TV rights fees are definitely higher than they were). Meanwhile, Punk has gone to WWE and had a career resurgence, no matter how much he is given blame for things that he didn’t do. Karma seems to be on the side of Punk on this one, for sure.
So to answer your question, what are you missing? That’s simple, you are missing an agenda. In my opinion, I think Meltzer and people who think the way he does felt that they would come out looking like prophets when the world would see this great thing that they had never seen before. They thought that they would be shown to be ahead of the curve, smarter than the average wrestling fan.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. WWE has never been hotter while AEW is nowhere close to doing the arena business or TV ratings that it did with Punk. To those people who have been proven wrong, well, it had to be a huge blow to the old ego, and in Meltzer's case, as he has shown the world on X, he has quite the ego. Those people couldn’t look in the mirror and admit the truth, that they were the very vocal minority of wrestling fans, so they needed to create someone to blame, and that person is CM Punk.
I even saw one supposedly credible reporter attack Punk for apologizing to the Saudis last week. That is how desperate they are now, they attack an act of contrition and create conspiracy theories to attack the man's character. People who grow and mature over time should be lauded. People who admit that they were wrong should be as well. But, the people now attacking Punk will never do either of those things in their lives, so it's something that they are incapable of understanding.
So in the end, be happy that you never fully understood their thinking until now. That means you aren’t like Meltzer and his ilk and that is a really, really good thing.
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