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In 2008, the New York Times published a brutal review of a Bravo show about Rachel Zoe, a celebrity stylist. (“She doesn’t merely peddle clothes, she emblazons an image, turning cipher nobodies into pretend somebodies,” the review read; Zoe, it went on, is “a pox on humanity,” and largely to blame for the fact that “the name Nicole Richie is more familiar than the name Nicolas Sarkozy.”) I discovered the review on CJR’s website this morning, thanks to a short article that we published noting that the review had won praise from an unusual source: Hulk Hogan, introduced here as “the now semi-retired professional wrestler and former WWF star.” Apparently, Hogan had declared the Times the winner of Us Weekly’s “Celeb Feud of the Week,” over Zoe. We noted that while John McCain’s presidential campaign had just bashed the Times—calling it “not by any standard a journalistic organization”—Hogan had been kinder; the paper, he said, “has been around a long time,” and “they know their stuff.” The headline on our piece read: “All the News That’s Fit to Headbutt.” 

I was searching for Hogan’s name in CJR’s archives because he died last week, reportedly after suffering a cardiac arrest. He was seventy-one. His death unleashed a wave of obituaries and think pieces. The Times alone ran at least eight of them: the lede of its main obituary credited his “flamboyance and star power” with helping to “transform professional wrestling from a low-budget regional attraction into a multibillion-dollar industry”; other pieces assessed how his wrestling persona pivoted from being a good guy (or “face”) to become a bad guy (or “heel”), his pop-cultural legacy (he appeared in movies like Rocky III), and what he wore, and didn’t. (Writing about style never goes out of style.) Elsewhere, journalists assessed his life through various prisms: Hogan the storyteller (“He expanded the narrative arc of the modern hero and the modern celebrity,” The Ringer’s David Shoemaker wrote); Hogan the role model (“One of the most heartbreaking things about growing up and becoming an adult is realizing that your infallible role models are just as human and as flawed as everyone else,” CNN’s Kyle Feldscher wrote); Hogan the racist. In 2015—ten years to the day before his death, as it would turn out—it emerged that the news site Gawker had obtained tapes on which Hogan could be heard repeating slurs and describing himself as “racist, to a point”; he expressed regret, but would later be criticized by other wrestlers for appearing, in a locker-room talk, to regret less what he said than getting caught. Writing for Andscape, David Dennis Jr. concluded, in light of these facts, that “Hulk Hogan’s legacy isn’t complicated.”

For many journalists, Hogan has another uncomplicated legacy—one that centrally involves Gawker. In October 2012, the site published snippets from a DVD sex tape that it had received showing Hogan having sex with the wife of his friend, a radio shock jock named Bubba the Love Sponge. (Hogan said that Bubba invited him to sleep with his wife but that he didn’t know he was being filmed; following Hogan’s death, Bubba said he was “heartbroken” and expressed regret that the pair didn’t mend fences.) “Even for a Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex in a Canopy Bed Is Not Safe for Work but Watch It Anyway,” Gawker’s headline read, and millions of people took its advice. Hogan sued, claiming that his privacy had been infringed; Gawker maintained that the tape was newsworthy—in part, circuitously, because rumors that the tape existed had been circulating—and protected speech. Initially, according to Murder the Truth, a recent book by the Times journalist David Enrich, editors at Gawker figured the lawsuit would either be thrown out or settled before any trial—but it ground on. (Indeed, the Hogan racism revelation stemmed from the proceedings.) What Gawker didn’t know is that while Hogan was the face of the case, it was being bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, who reportedly hated Gawker. (Most accounts trace this to an affiliated blog outing him as gay, but Thiel had other beef with the site and its staff; publicly, he said that he had taken on a bully as a philanthropic gesture.) In 2016, the suit went to trial in Florida, where a jury awarded Hogan a hundred and forty million dollars in damages. Gawker settled for less—but went bankrupt.

Actually, the legacy of the Gawker suit is a bit complicated in certain respects. As Ben Smith explored in his 2023 book Traffic, the sex-tape story got caught up in changing social attitudes toward digital privacy, among other things, in the years between its publication and Gawker’s eventual downfall. And even at the time, it was a stretch to label some of the things that Gawker did as “journalism”; writing in the Times over the weekend, Elizabeth Spiers, a cofounder of Gawker, called it “largely an entertainment site” that could be “frivolous, crass, and even mean,” adding that Hogan’s suit “was not important because Gawker was important.” Nonetheless, on its best days, as Spiers noted, the site did #MeToo stories before #MeToo (it also published Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous “black book” a full decade before the current Epstein imbroglio); as Enrich observes in his book, it also pioneered a skepticism toward Silicon Valley that would spread into politer corners of the press, to the detriment of the Thiels of the world. And whatever you think of Gawker and sex tapes, Hogan’s suit was important in establishing, as Spiers put it, “a playbook for deep-pocketed people to pressure news outlets by weaponizing the judicial process and threatening them with bankruptcy.” The line through to Trump’s various lawsuits today is easy to sketch, and pundits have duly done so. Indeed, Hogan and Trump, as Spiers wrote, were alike, in that both “benefited heavily from media coverage, courted it when that suited them and, when it didn’t, tried to shut it down.” (It seems a very far cry, it must be said, from defending the honor of the New York Times. Then again, maybe not.)

Hogan’s lawsuit is, obviously, a huge part of his legacy; the Gawker verdict was historic, and the chilling effect it engendered was, and likely remains, very real. Still, the suit might form a bigger part of Thiel’s obituary when that’s eventually written (assuming the cryogenics don’t work). And if Hogan hadn’t sued a news site out of existence, it seems likely to me that someone else would have—perhaps a different plaintiff against Gawker, bankrolled by Thiel. At the very least, Hogan didn’t invent this age of escalating press threats, even if he did come to embody it (and will surely continue to do so for generations of aspiring media lawyers). 

Indeed, Hogan’s more interesting media legacy might lie on the front end of Spiers’s equation—in how he used media coverage and exposure to burnish a legend, not how he tried to shut that exposure down. Hogan clearly came to embody the celebrity culture that has shaped so much of this era and its politics (and without which, of course, Gawker would never have existed in the first place). His obituary in the Times quoted from a story that the paper ran in 1984 noting that, even “in blasé Manhattan, where the likes of Jackie O. and Mr. T have been observed walking the streets unhindered, Hulk Hogan cannot go 10 feet”; the obituary also explored how, around the same time, Hogan changed the (literal) “face” of wrestling through the sheer force of his popularity. He would later star in a reality-TV show—Hogan Knows Best (2005), in which he featured alongside his family—and was a media product, apparently, to the very end and beyond: at the time of his death, Netflix was reportedly working on a documentary project with his participation. (Per CNN, filming is ongoing.) Wrestling Observer, a specialist publication, repeatedly named him the “most overrated wrestler” from a technical standpoint. But that didn’t impede his legend.

Of course, Hogan is not the only person to have benefited from celebrity culture, and he certainly didn’t invent it. But he was central to a dynamic that’s more specific to wrestling: the idea of “kayfabe,” or the pretense that the action in the ring reflects reality when it is, in fact, staged. As James Poniewozik, the excellent Times TV critic, put it in his 2019 book Audience of One, wrestling has long, in this way, “toyed with the line between real and fake,” and there is perhaps no more obvious example of this than Hogan. (Indeed, some of the recent remembrances have mined the striking duality between the character of Hogan and Terry Bollea, which was Hogan’s real name—a duality that came memorably into relief during the Gawker trial, when he said that, despite Hulk Hogan’s public boasting about having a ten-inch penis, he, Terry Bollea, did not have a ten-inch penis.) The blurry line between the real and the fake is, of course, itself a defining feature of this era and its politics, thanks in no small part to Trump, who is the “audience of one” of Poniewozik’s title. Prior to his political career, Trump literally took part in the spectacle of WWE, and he carried elements of it over, as Poniewozik reports. In 2015, when Trump hosted his first big rally as a presidential candidate, he took the stage to Hogan’s theme song, and at one point stepped back from the podium, put his thumbs up, and let the crowd bay as they might for “Hogan in the ring.” At last year’s Republican National Convention, in the days after Trump was nearly assassinated, Hogan endorsed him, ripping off his vest to reveal a campaign logo beneath. “I didn’t come here as Hulk Hogan, but I just had to give you a little taste,” he said, once the crowd had calmed down. “My name is Terry Bollea, and as an entertainer, I try to stay out of politics. But after everything that’s happened to our country over the past four years and everything that happened last weekend, I can no longer stay silent.” Trump, he intimated, has been around a long time, and knows his stuff.

While searching around this morning, I found, in addition to the old CJR article about Hogan and the Times, a video interview that he shot with the paper in 2009, while he was promoting a book. The interview is interspersed with clips of Hogan in character, punching toward the camera in shades and a bandanna, but when he is shown answering questions, his voice is soft, his shades are up, and his eyes look tired. The interviewer quotes a “terrific distinction” that Hogan drew in the book, in which he argued that wrestling isn’t fake, but predetermined. “‘Fake’ implies that the punches don’t hurt,” Hogan—or should that be Bollea?—replies, thoughtfully. “The injuries are real. The drama’s real. The crashing and burning of people’s financial worlds and personal lives are real. And the confrontation and the drama in the ring is real.”

Other Notable Stories…
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved Skydance Media’s 8.4-billion-dollar acquisition of Paramount Global, which owns CBS. The deal is expected to close within two weeks. FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who was initially nominated as a commissioner in 2017 by Donald Trump, and who authored a chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, said in a statement: “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change. That is why I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network.” Skydance has said that all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives will be shelved, and that CBS News will feature “varied ideological perspectives.” The FCC approved the deal in a 2–1 vote. Dissenting was Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez, who said the FFC under Carr had “used its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement”—referring to the sixteen million dollars Paramount agreed to pay Trump over his lawsuit against 60 Minutes—“and further erode press freedom.” 

• The news followed protesters marching to CBS headquarters in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, demonstrating against the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. A petition to save the show has notched over 258,000 signatures. Paramount said the call was purely financial, but many opponents of the decision believe Colbert’s criticism of the president may have influenced the show’s cancellation. (Other Paramount shows, including South Park and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, likewise criticized the company this week.) Meanwhile, for CJR, Kyle Paoletta wrote about the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s push to hold Paramount accountable for what it sees as cowardly capitulation to the Trump administration’s media attacks. And in related news, as Congress rescinded 1.1 billion dollars this month from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, donors shot up in the past three months—contributing an estimated twenty million dollars in annual value.

• “Some of us drink salt water just to remain standing while we work.… There are moments when my hands tremble too hard to hold a pen, when I can’t focus my eyes on the camera lens in front of me.… The hunger scrambles everything—thought, memory, even language.” These are the words of Shrouq Aila, a Palestinian journalist, from Meghnad Bose’s CJR piece about how journalists are starving in Gaza. It comes as “hunger has reached catastrophic levels” in the coastal strip, according to the UN World Food Programme, which says a third of the population of 2.1 million are going days without food. The AFP news agency has called on Israel to allow the evacuation of its freelance contributors as they struggle to work due to starvation. The UN World Health Organization said that at least sixty-three people have died from malnutrition-related causes this month alone, including twenty-four children younger than five, in an “entirely preventable” crisis caused by Israel’s obstruction of aid. Diplomatic pressure mounted on Israel last week—as images of starving Palestinians shocked the international community, the death toll from its assault on Gaza neared sixty thousand since October 7, 2023, and the UN human rights office said over a thousand people had been killed at aid distribution points since May—forcing Israel on Sunday to announce daily pauses in military operations to allow aid airdrops. 

• Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on an episode released last Monday of Full Send, which The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi calls a “‘manosphere’-adjacent” podcast from “useful idiots” the Nelk Boys. “You can watch the entire inane 70 minutes for yourself if you want to sacrifice some braincells and get served annoying ads for sports betting and cryptocurrency,” Mahdawi writes. “But the ‘too long; didn’t listen’ summary of the conversation is that Netanyahu touched on all his preferred talking points and lied continuously without any pushback.” (The Nelk Boys followed Donald Trump on his campaign plane last year, which Jake Lahut discussed as part of Trump’s wider election strategy for CJR.) At one stage, the Nelk Boys asked Netanyahu: “What’s your go-to at McDonald’s?” The YouTube channel lost over ten thousand subscribers after uploading the episode. 

• In media jobs news, Tanya Simon was announced as the incoming executive producer for CBS News’s 60 Minutes. The appointment of Simon, a longtime journalist and producer on the show, put an end to staff nervousness that the network would appoint an outsider to replace Bill Owens, who resigned in April. Elsewhere, David Cho, the editor in chief of Barron’s, will become editor in chief at CNBC beginning August 11, it was announced earlier this month. Jason Douglas, a reporter in the Wall Street Journal’s Singapore bureau, will become the paper’s Tokyo bureau chief. And the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism announced the eight journalists awarded McGraw Investigative Reporting Grants, for projects ranging from crypto money-laundering to private equity ownership of childcare facilities.

• And Little, Brown, and Co. have acquired former president Joe Biden’s memoir, with an advance of around ten million dollars. Biden, eighty-two, said this month he was “working my tail off” to write a memoir of his time in the White House. The Wall Street Journal, which broke news of the deal, pointed out that Biden’s advance was smaller than the sums paid to former presidents Barack Obama (sixty million dollars, in 2017) and Bill Clinton (fifteen million, 2004) for their books. As well as providing an income, memoirs give former presidents a chance to define their achievements and shape their legacy. This is something Biden may be particularly keen on, after recent books that documented his failed bid for reelection, such as Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by political reporters Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, and Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple.

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