Here at Cageside Seats, we've thoroughly detailed the hypocrisy of WWE's Be a STAR anti-bullying campaign in light of both their onscreen and offscreen behaviour.
On their television programming, their lead kids hero John Cena often resorts to mocking his opponents in a mean-spirited manner and beating up helpless victims. WWE even resorted to the basest of misogyny in order to get him cheers in the run up to WrestleMania 28.
This wasn't the first time either, as fat jokes used to be aimed at Vickie Guerrero with alarming regularity, until Lisa Wright of the Council For Unity publicly spoke out about it and some compromise was reached. However, despite still being a part of the Be a STAR Alliance, recently the Vickie fat jokes have started to creep back in.
With Vince McMahon's behaviour on Monday night, those partners should be second guessing once again getting into bed with WWE. Moreover, Linda McMahon, who is trying to obtain political office using her husband's cash, should be taken to task for his nasty televised dig at an employee who has been working for his company for almost 20 years. She wants to run on a platform that WWE programming is now PG rated and is thus suitable viewing for children, so why do incidents like the one I will describe below still occur?
For those that didn't watch Raw, Vince publicly mocked the facial paralysis Jim Ross has been left with after three bouts of Bell's palsy. A photo of Vince's crass mannerisms can be seen here. It would be bad enough if Vince was portraying a heel and trying to get booed, but the skit was done attempting to get fans to laugh with him at Good Ol' JR's disfigurement. What a responsible lesson to be sending to the youth of today!
Of course, this is nothing new for WWE's chairman. As we detailed last August, McMahon and the rest of his inner circle have been making fun of JR's Bell's palsy for years behind his back and love getting under his skin with nasty ribs at his expense.
I expect this time Vince is privately upset that his son-in-law Triple H brought him off the sidelines to be the lead announcer for the new NXT. It has been a long running joke that every time Vince finally thinks he's seen the last of Ross as an announcer, he has to eventually call him back to return because he finds his replacements to be so unsuitable. At some point Vince always takes it out on Ross for being so damned good at his job that a younger, more camera friendly, wannabe just can't cut the mustard in comparison.
Indeed, in recent years it seems that Vince has only brought Ross back to bury him on TV and get his rocks off by tormenting him in the process, before quickly kicking him to the curb once he's had his fun. Rest assured Vince would prefer it if someone else was the play-by-play man for NXT, even though it is currently consigned to the Internet and overseas markets.
After the jump, you can read what Dave Meltzer had to say about Vince McMahon's character in light of this segment in this week's Wrestling Observer Newsletter. I must say I agree with his strong opinions.
What was the most ironic about this is as Vince is doing it, in the background you see the "Be a Star" logo. He must think those people in charge of the Be a Star program are so wowed by celebrity’s talking to them and money that they have no principles at all. I mean, you could mock J.R. and do all that and nobody will ever be the wiser. But when you twist your face like that, you’re the kid in school making fun of a guy because of his medical affliction. I think Vince just likes to show his arrogance or something, because they already slapped him around last year on the Vickie stuff and he had to stop it. I don’t know if they were going to pull out, but there was a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes and it ended up with WWE agreeing to do no more fat jokes on Vickie. Although the last few weeks they’ve been slowly bringing them back. And then they showed a segment of Otunga and Stephanie McMahon going into a school telling the young kids not to bully others verbally or physically.