Why WWE Dropped The Ball With Rusev
Unhappy Rusev Day.
This week on Monday Night Raw, Rusev returned from the WWE wilderness as part of the Maria and Mike Kanellis pregnancy storyline. This is news. Or it was, anyway.
That first sentence is entirely factual. It's a report of a thing that happened, after the fact, relayed without opinion or suggestion. It's news in the purest sense of the word, but less so in 2019, when stories come so thick and fast from a myriad of sources that they've lost their value within hours of happening. If they actually even happened. This is the news cycle - it's slapdash, muddied and confused, and WWE love it that way.
Rusev's return was a f*cking mess. Pitiful use of a once-pushed performer and sagging, sh*tty angle.
That sentence isn't news, but WWE are happy for this opinion to exist in the ether on the same page as the "news" because "news" dissolves quickly, like everything else. "News" in smarmy speech marks because much of what gets published online isn't news, but media. It's a clear difference obscured by increasingly blurred lines over the last several years. Not a single person at WhatCulture.com would call their work journalism, yet countless pieces are besieged by comments section critics referring to writers as journalists and writing as reporting. The game has changed so much in the past two decades that it's hard to see where news ends and comment begins.
But comment begins here - the mere fact that the 'Bulgarian Brute' has fallen out of the news cycle is Why WWE Have Dropped The Ball With Rusev.
He's barely been back a week, and it's like he was never away. Forget why. How has this happened?
CONT'D...