"The standards are being lowered, not just on the Internet, but in all of news and media"
About this Quote
A man who built a multibillion-dollar empire by turning “lowbrow” into prime-time spectacle is uniquely positioned to mourn the lowering of standards. Vince McMahon’s line works because it’s both diagnosis and alibi: a complaint about the media ecosystem that quietly recasts his own brand of sensationalism as either the inevitable product of the age or, more shrewdly, the least hypocritical version of it.
The intent reads like boundary-setting. McMahon isn’t just swiping at the Internet’s chaos; he’s widening the indictment to “all of news and media,” flattening distinctions between tabloid churn, cable outrage, clickbait, and scripted entertainment. That move smuggles in a provocative equivalence: if everything is becoming wrestling, then wrestling isn’t the outlier. It’s the honest genre, openly selling heat, villains, cliffhangers, and cheap pops rather than pretending to be dispassionate while chasing the same dopamine metrics.
The subtext is a defense of attention as the true currency. “Standards” here doesn’t mean accuracy alone; it signals taste, gatekeeping, and the old prestige hierarchy. McMahon’s career has been a long war against those gatekeepers, yet he also relied on them as foils. This complaint keeps the foil alive. It suggests a lost era of editorial control while acknowledging a present reality where outrage and virality set the agenda.
Contextually, it lands in a culture where platforms reward speed over verification and performance over reporting. Coming from McMahon, it doubles as a knowing wink: he helped write the playbook, and now he’s telling you everyone’s running it.
The intent reads like boundary-setting. McMahon isn’t just swiping at the Internet’s chaos; he’s widening the indictment to “all of news and media,” flattening distinctions between tabloid churn, cable outrage, clickbait, and scripted entertainment. That move smuggles in a provocative equivalence: if everything is becoming wrestling, then wrestling isn’t the outlier. It’s the honest genre, openly selling heat, villains, cliffhangers, and cheap pops rather than pretending to be dispassionate while chasing the same dopamine metrics.
The subtext is a defense of attention as the true currency. “Standards” here doesn’t mean accuracy alone; it signals taste, gatekeeping, and the old prestige hierarchy. McMahon’s career has been a long war against those gatekeepers, yet he also relied on them as foils. This complaint keeps the foil alive. It suggests a lost era of editorial control while acknowledging a present reality where outrage and virality set the agenda.
Contextually, it lands in a culture where platforms reward speed over verification and performance over reporting. Coming from McMahon, it doubles as a knowing wink: he helped write the playbook, and now he’s telling you everyone’s running it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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