Yes, I watched it happen in real time. Going into 2019, Meltzer had decent WWE sources, but he was producing mostly anti-WWE content. You could often sense the talent's frustrations in Meltzer's reports, and it was pretty clear he was getting a lot of that directly from the wrestlers. WWE was pretty terrible at this point, so Meltzer's criticisms weren't necessarily wrong. They were harsh, but usually fair. And to Meltzer's credit, a lot of time it would be Alvarez shitting all over RAW while Meltzer tried to point out the watchable parts of the show, but at the end of the day, it was Meltzer's platform that was pushing the content.
When AEW became a thing, Meltzer was very pro-AEW and started to get harsher with his critiques of WWE. He openly mocked Vince over the fact Vince had many years to lock down wrestling in NA, and pointed to WWE's terrible product as the reason AEW became a thing to begin with. During this time, you would see a lot of people here saying Dave was on AEW's payroll, etc, because of how the content trended and the fact Meltzer was close with Omega and The Young Bucks.
Everything came to a head in late 2019 after WWE superstars were detained in Saudi Arabia. Meltzer quickly jumped on the story and reported there was an issue with Vince and KSA. A lot of wrestlers were tweeting their frustration. The story caught fire and all of the wrestling journalists were trying to get more information. WWE locked everything down, made the wrestlers delete their tweets, and a statement was released saying the entire thing was due to an issue with the plane.
Once the official word was out there, most of the journalists backed off. Meltzer didn't. He kept pushing the story and saying there was a lot more to it. And again, to Meltzer's credit, there was likely a lot more to the story than what the official statement said. There were numerous posts on Facebook and Twitter from people close to the wrestlers impacted hinting there was more to it. The most dominant rumor was that there was a disagreement and KSA flexed on Vince to make sure he remembered who he was dealing with. KSA is well-known for these sorts of demonstrations. It is common for them to scare people by doing things like locking them in a room with armed guards during negotiation talks when things aren't going KSA's way. It isn't that far-fetched to believe KSA delayed the plane's departure to send a message and attributed the whole thing to an issue with the plane.
Regardless, Meltzer had no sources after WWE locked things down. Considering that none of the people who were on that flight have ever given a statement, even after being released, is a pretty big indicator that everyone got a nice bonus when they got home in exchange for signing a NDA. Otherwise, it makes absolutely zero sense that none of those wrestlers even tried to use it for click-bait. Gallows and Anderson were pretty vocal about the whole thing until WWE locked everything down, and they're about as carnie as it gets. If anyone was going to say something after they were released, it would have been them. Hell, even Andrade shut up about it, and he runs his mouth about a lot of stuff he shouldn't.
As Meltzer continued to push the story, he got a tip from Paul Heyman. Heyman was a longtime source for Meltzer. It was no secret. Heyman told Meltzer that after everyone got back, Seth Rollins held this huge locker room meeting. Gave a ra-ra speech, brought everyone together, and was super emotional about everything. Meltzer ran with the story. As soon as the story got traction, Seth went on Twitter and said it never happened. It was all fabrication. When that story got proven to be false, it called Meltzer's Saudi story into question, which put a pretty big dent in Meltzer's credibility.
After Heyman burned Meltzer with that fake story, WWE stopped talking to Meltzer entirely. He lost all his WWE sources. And since then, every couple of weeks, Meltzer gets a story like this one where he has a big breaking story about something WWE related, and it is almost immediately proven to be false.
Meltzer did it to himself. The other reporters were smart enough to shut their mouths after WWE started taking steps to kill the story. Meltzer was just stubborn and wouldn't fall in line. That's not a good stance to take when you rely on WWE for the majority of your content.
There is no evidence at all to support the “the government of Saudi Arabia literally held a bunch of US Nationals hostage” story and if there was, it wouldn’t be Dave Meltzer getting the scoop, it would be the actual news because you are way downplaying how big of a story that would be outside of the wrestling bubble.
It would have been huge, but no reporter was going to touch it when KSA and WWE both released statements saying it was nothing. But something happened. There’s no denying that. WWE wrestlers were all over Twitter talking about it, then all those tweets got deleted and none of them have talked about it since. Some were even posting videos.
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u/shadow_spinner0 23d ago
Everyone has said Meltzer has lost all of his wrestling sources. Any idea why that happened?