KB's Review: Push It Or Mail It

This past Sunday night at “Battleground”, Lana cut a promo before Rusev’s match with Jack Swagger. As usual, she talked about how superior Russia is to the United States and how President Obama is pathetic compared to Russian President Vladimir Putin. This has been going on for months now and is nothing new, but by Sunday, a few things had changed in the world.

Last week, a Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine, killing over 300 people. There is a chance that President Putin was connected to the attack, making him look like the most evil man in the world. During Lana’s promo, she said that it was unfair to blame President Putin for the current world events, hinting at the plane crash without actually mentioning it.

As anyone with common sense would expect, the promo received a lot of backlash from the media. Outlets such as “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart”, The Daily Mail, The New York Daily News and The Washington Post all referenced the promo and most of the coverage was negative. WWE’s statement on the promo was that it was not referencing the plane crash and that Lana has been making similar statements for months.

This isn’t the first time WWE has received negative media backlash for statements made by their characters. It happened as recently as last year with Zeb Colter and his Tea Party caricature. However, despite this happening only a year ago, the WWE seems content to have a different reaction reaction this time: distancing themselves from the media attention and say that wasn’t their intent.

This brings me to the point that I’m trying to get at: WWE needs to know what’s coming with controversial characters and figure out how to deal with them. Their stance seems to change with different cases, despite the situations often being similar. Let’s look at some examples. Please note that I’m not saying these situations are all on the same level or that they should have been handled the same.

We’ll start with one of the most commonly referenced: Muhammad Hassan. On July 4, 2005, Hassan was involved in a segment where masked terrorists attacked the Undertaker and tied a wire around his neck, attempting to strangle him. Three days later, a series of bombs exploded on the London underground, killing over fifty people. WWE aired the segment unedited on the following “Smackdown” with a warning for viewers. UPN, the network that aired “Smackdown” pressured WWE into keeping Hassan off of their network. Hassan lost his match to Undertaker at “Great American Bash” and was released from the company less than three months later.

Later that year, Eddie Guerrero passed away in his hotel room due to heart issues. After airing a tribute show to Guerrero, WWE started to use his death in storylines, ranging from blowing up one of Eddie’s trademark low riders to having Randy Orton say that Guerrero was burning in hell instead of watching from Heaven. While not the same as a story related to a major world event, running stories based on the death of one of your wrestlers and some of the comments made about Guerrero certainly were controversial.

Then there’s last year’s situation, where media outlets accused WWE of mocking the Tea Party movement with the Colter character. In this case, WWE took the opposite course of action from the Lana situation and embraced the criticism, even having Colter and Jack Swagger break character in a video on WWE.com. In the video, Colter said that they were merely portraying characters and invited Glenn Beck, one of the most vocal critics, to appear on “Monday Night Raw” and air his views in an open forum. Beck declined and the characters continued with no major changes.

That brings us back to the Lana promo, where WWE seems to be taking a new course of action and saying that it was a character making these statements while distancing themselves from the comments. Obviously WWE had to expect a backlash over the comments with a 24/7 media needing topics to fill in their hours on TV and the story is related to one of the top news items in the world at the moment.

WWE doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing or be able to see the obvious consequences of their actions. If they want to push the envelope, they can’t pull back as soon as someone complains about what they’re doing. Instead, they’re pushing the envelope an inch and then then backing away when someone complains about them. There’s nothing wrong with being controversial, but if you just run away from it as soon as it happens, it looks less like you’re trying to be edgy and more like you have no idea what you want to do. Either push the envelope or put a letter in it and mail it like everyone else does.

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