PW Vulture Culture: Using Hayden’s Death for Clicks (And How Easily It Could Have Gotten Nasty)
Yesterday, a wave of wrestling websites rushed to capitalize on a tragic death, publishing lazy content built around wrestlers who took to social media to quote or comment on the passing of Hayden Panettiere.
Among the names heavily circulated by outlets looking for easy engagement was Jacob Fatu.
Let’s be completely transparent about how the dirt sheets and mainstream wrestling blogs operate versus how actual integrity works. If WrestleVoice wanted to be a bottom-feeding, click-chasing rag like the rest of them, the headline write-up practically writes itself:
Ex-Convict Armed Robber WWE Star Teases Knowing the Truth About Hayden’s Death
Every single word in that hypothetical headline is one-hundred percent, unadulterated factual history.
It’s his actual background, combined directly with his own public social media post dropping the classic, cryptic "the truth will come out" line barely a day after someone passed away.
We didn’t connect him to the tragedy—he did that himself by posting ambiguous, attention-seeking nonsense while a body was barely cold, purely to fish for interaction.
The Line Between Reporting and Vulture Culture
The difference between what those other sites do and what real journalism looks like is the refusal to weaponize a tragedy for traffic.
Posting a wrestler's vague, look-at-me tweet about a death just to harvest views is gross. Doing it while completely ignoring the absurdity of the performer doing it is standard wrestling media operating procedure. They are insulated by their own collective stupidity and the fact that they all cover for each other's garbage ethics.
When a former armed robber turned WWE star posts cryptic teasers a day after a tragedy, the wrestling blogs race to amplify it because outrage and mystery drive clicks. They don't care about respect, and they don't care about the person who died. They care about the algorithm.
We didn't run that headline because we aren't pieces of shit. But let this serve as a loud reminder of how the sausage is made in the dirt sheet world—and how easy it would be to expose them at their own game if anyone actually wanted to stoop to their level.
RIP Hayden, we couldn’t save the Cheerleader, but there is still time for us, to save the World.
