When Boca Raton News Co-Editor John Johnston was contacted by the Press, he noted that his paper wasn’t the only media outlet to make the error.
He explained that the reporter who wrote the story had heard the erroneous divorce report from local television stations and included it in his story. He added that the paper would not be running a correction because it’s impossible to define what is real and what isn’t when it comes to wrestling.

“You can do a correction on a fact, not on a farce,” Johnston says.

Johnston’s line of reasoning is a farce. Yes, the report that WWE head Vince McMahon was seeking a divorce from his wife is fiction. But the News reported it as fact. That requires a correction. Or, more appropriately, an Editor’s Note. Johnston also has the gall to suggest that his paper’s error is excusable just because other media outlets made the same mistake. And he seems to think that blindly republishing information without sourcing it is an acceptable practice in the newsroom. One more thing: The offending story is still online with the incorrect last line. So no correction and no fix. We’ll leave the rest of the smackdown to a wrestling reporter:

Such comments irritate Dave Scherer, a reporter and editor with the Pro Wrestling Insider website (www.pwinsider.com), who counters that the attitude a paper takes about a wrestling story often causes it to make errors.

“The problem is that too many reporters in the mainstream media treat wrestling as a joke and therefore don’t fact-check the way that they would for what they consider a ‘real’ story,” Scherer maintains. “It’s pretty obvious to me that they don’t care about their journalistic integrity when they repeatedly ‘report’ information that isn’t true, make no effort to check their facts and then never correct their mistakes after the fact.”

The Press article also notes that this isn’t the first time the mainstream press mistook a wrestling plot for reality:

In fairness to the BRN, this isn’t the first time the media has confused reality and ruse as it relates to the squared circle. Mike Mooneyham, a longtime pro wrestling columnist for the Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier, tells of the time several years ago when the legendary “Nature Boy” Ric Flair was competing for the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling and faked a heart attack as part of a storyline.

“The next day it was widely reported on the local media that Flair had suffered a heart attack,” Mooneyham remembers. “Granted, there wasn’t much time for verification, but the angle was played out so realistically that some of the media bit. One local sports guy here in Charleston did call my house the next evening to corroborate the incident. When my wife told him I was out of town—at a Christmas party with Ric—he knew he had been had.”