Posted in: AEW, Sports, TV | Tagged: brody king, wrestling

Meltzer Debunks Own Report on WBD Brody King AEW Dynamite TV Ban

Dave Meltzer has retracted his report that WBD blocked Brody King from AEW Dynamite over anti-ICE chants, after denials from WBD, AEW, and rival journalists.

In an increasingly rare turn of events in the modern media landscape — a journalist correcting his own reporting — veteran wrestling observer Dave Meltzer has walked back his widely circulated claim that Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) intervened to prevent wrestler Brody King from appearing on last Wednesday's episode of AEW Dynamite. The retraction follows a cascade of conflicting reports from rival journalists and an official denial from WBD itself, effectively dismantling the narrative that had, within hours of its publication, transcended the wrestling media ecosystem and penetrated mainstream discourse.

As Bleeding Cool reported earlier today, Meltzer had stated on Wrestling Observer Radio that WBD had directed All Elite Wrestling (AEW) to keep King off television in order to prevent a recurrence of the viral "F— ICE" chants that erupted during the previous week's broadcast from Las Vegas. Meltzer's original reporting was unambiguous in its attribution:

"The deal is that they didn't want the fans in the arena to be chanting that. If Brody came out, there was that risk. When he comes back it will happen again. I don't know how they're going to handle it. This is, again, not a Tony call. This is from above. You know what it is, nobody wants to get on Trump's bad side."

The report detonated across social media with considerable velocity, fueled by its resonance with broader anxieties about corporate self-censorship in the current political climate and WBD's vulnerability as a company pursuing a potential acquisition by Netflix that would require federal regulatory approval. However, the foundational claims began to fracture almost immediately as competing journalists weighed in with contradictory information.

Rival Reports Cast Doubt

Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select was among the first to publicly challenge the narrative, posting on X: "The rumors that Brody King was kept off AEW Dynamite by WBD were vehemently denied to me."

Andrew Zarian of the Mat Men Pro Wrestling Podcast corroborated Sapp's reporting, adding on X: "I can piggyback on this. I reached out to WBD contacts, and they had not heard of anything regarding this."

The denials escalated further when WBD itself took the extraordinary step of issuing a formal statement to Brandon Thurston of POST Wrestling, who shared the statement on X: "Warner Bros. Discovery did not have any involvement in Brody King's upcoming AEW schedule. Any speculation to the contrary is categorically false. Brody is scheduled to appear during the next AEW event, which will air this Saturday on TNT and HBO Max."

Thurston subsequently reported that AEW's own internal apparatus had aligned with WBD's denial, writing on X: "An AEW official with direct knowledge of the subject affirmed WBD's denial and indicated Meltzer's report is incorrect and that WBD's statement is true."

Meltzer Issues Correction

Faced with a comprehensive and multi-sourced repudiation of his reporting, Meltzer ultimately took to X himself to issue a correction:

"Those at AEW have said nobody from WBD asked them not to use Brody King on last night's show and this was just how it was booked to only use him in a video package. We had heard over the weekend that there were concerns about how much pub the situation had gotten from the WBD side, but those at AEW said that they were not told not to put him on the show."

Meltzer followed up: "So this corrects the report from last night. It had been a topic of discussion over the weekend."

The correction is notable for its measured concession while simultaneously preserving a vestige of the original thesis — namely, that the "F— ICE" chants and their attendant publicity had indeed been "a topic of discussion" within the corporate hierarchy, even if that discussion did not ultimately produce the directive Meltzer had initially reported. Whether one interprets this framing as journalistic nuance or face-saving hedging is, perhaps, a matter of individual disposition.

The Story Beneath the Story

The episode is instructive on multiple levels. It serves as a reminder that even the most established figures in wrestling journalism are susceptible to the fog of imperfect sourcing, and that the velocity of modern media distribution can transform a single report into an unassailable conventional wisdom before countervailing information has the opportunity to surface. It is also, to Meltzer's credit, worth noting that the journalist corrected his own reporting rather than allowing it to calcify into accepted lore — a standard of accountability that, while it should be unremarkable, has become vanishingly rare in an era where doubling down is the default posture of the incorrectly informed.

What the episode does not resolve, however, is the underlying tension that made Meltzer's original report so immediately and viscerally plausible to such a broad audience. The reason the claim that a publicly traded media conglomerate would suppress a wrestler's television appearance to avoid antagonizing President Donald Trump's administration was believed instantly and without reservation by hundreds of thousands of people is precisely because such behavior would be entirely consistent with the observable pattern of corporate conduct in the current political environment. A report does not achieve the kind of instantaneous, cross-platform virality that this one achieved unless it confirms something people already believe to be directionally true about the world they inhabit. At the same time, when those reports turn out to not be true, it only adds to the fog that benefits the administration in a world where truth and reality are no longer agreed-upon across ideological divides.

King remains scheduled to challenge Maxwell Jacob Friedman for the AEW World Championship at AEW Grand Slam Australia this Sunday, and per WBD's own statement, will appear on this Saturday's episode of AEW Collision on TNT and HBO Max. The chants, one suspects, will follow him.

And while it appears that Meltzer's specific report has been thoroughly and definitively debunked, it remains an immutable fact that among those who believed the report was true and those who believe it was false, the Venn diagram of their opinions on "F— ICE" and President Donald Trump remains a perfect, unbroken circle.

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