My wife is a wrestling fan. I find it kind of annoying myself, but I end up soaking it up passively when she's watching it in the living room. It's essentially just a giant soap opera with athletics tossed in. My wife is rather broken up over it though.

As for canceling and making a tribute show, they're planning on apologizing for it on their tuesday show here. (Which just happened as I was typing it here.) You're right, they didn't have all the facts in. They've done tributes like this before with short notice, like with Eddie Guerrero. What's even worse than that is they did a fake story of the owner of the company being blown up inside his limo just a couple weeks before it happened, so when it did happen nobody thought it was real.

As for it being treated as news, isn't it a combination of the two? You didn't see them reporting the deaths at VT as "education." You did hit on an appropriate combination though, since wrestling calls itself "Sports Entertainment." That means this is "Sports Entertainment News."

As for why it's being treated as a local story, I have no farking idea.