December 5, 1999 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: WWF losing advertisers, Steve Austin gets good news regarding neck, more

If you’re looking for this week’s top story to be simplified into good vs. evil, you’re looking in the wrong place.

After two years of the WWF’s new direction turning it into prime advertising for companies aiming products at in particular, teenage and young adult males, suddenly, this week advertisers were dropping like flies. Besides Coca Cola dropping all WWF sponsorship three weeks ago, which spawned a lot of mainstream media coverage this week, and the crowning of Parent Television Council chairman L. Brent Bozell in the former Phil Mushnick role as the enemy No. 1 of the WWF and all wrestling fans who simplify their morality into what is good or bad for the moment in wrestling, or those who allow wrestling promoters to do their thinking for them, hits came from such heavyweights as the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, M & M Mars and AT&T. Many media outlets also aligned Wrigleys with this boycott, but they actually, with relatively little publicity, pulled out of WWF programming early in the year citing problems with the content. Ironically, two years after he predicted it and burned to his political death on the stake of Monday night ratings and apparent mind-altering drug induced booking, for publicly believing it, Eric Bischoff’s prediction of the long-term of this direction doesn’t look nearly as out of touch.

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