When It Comes to Cubdom, Practice What you Preach

By Jeff Fuldauer

I hear ya, Dan. Barack Obama waffles on issues. He flips, he flops, and often his past actions contradict his current mission to revolutionize politics. But if you, Dan Proft, take a look at your own mission to revolutionize journalism, you will find similar flaws.

With your new Web site, you are pushing a multifaceted and revolutionary method of tackling convoluted issues by adding video reports to your written ones. But your quick-hitting, knee-jerk, reactionary commentaries are perfect examples of the low-depth journalism you seem to abhor. The bread-and-butter shtick that has earned you recognition in the field of journalism is exactly what you’re seeking to eliminate. Revolutionary, you say? Sounds more like hypocrisy to me.

For example, your Oct. 1 WLS Radio commentary, “Chicago Cubs Fans: The Triumph of Hope over Experience,” couldn’t be farther from revolutionary. You spend more than 300 words on the most tiresome opinion in Chicago history: The Cubs will forever remain losers, and to remain hopeful is useless and foolish. This isn’t beating a dead horse. This is unearthing the graveyard behind the glue factory to collectively beat the most famous of dead horses.

In your presentation to the class, you preached that “regurgitating party-line talking points” is the greatest sin in opinion writing. But in bashing the North Side ball club, you’ve gone where so many columnists have gone so many times before, and given us nothing original. Of course, as a White Sox fan, you deem the Cubs as hopeless as Charlie Brown. That’s what all fans of the rival ball club believe. What you fail to do, as your mission statement suggests, is back up your argument with the “analytical detailed understanding” you say is at the heart of a successful journalism.

Instead of explaining how continual shifts in management have laid the groundwork for the Cubs’ inconsistency, you quip about a laundry list of blunders. Anyone who has studied the organization’s failure knows that neither Steve Bartman, nor Billy Sianis, nor the billy goat have anything to do with what has come to be known as “Cubdoom.” Why not mention the lack of a consistent offense or lack of leadership? Instead, you’ve committed your second favorite opinion-writing sin---delivering a piece that is, in your words, “nothing illuminating, nothing insightful.”

You slam other columnists, specifically those at the Chicago Sun Times who support U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, for “love-fest diary entries.” But your piece on the Cubs is just another page in the diary of a longtime White Sox fan.

I commend you for tackling one of the biggest challenges in journalism today, seeking to deliver more in-depth coverage and analysis with a multi-media approach. But that sentiment doesn’t carry over to your columns. Just as you have criticized Obama for not offering solutions to reform politics, you have criticized the Cubs’ futility without offering any rhyme or reason as to why they continue to struggle and why their song will remain the same.

To conclude your class presentation on opinion writing, you proclaimed, “I’m pro-hope!” and stressed that “consistency is key” in presenting a well-informed, information-packed piece. Yet your column warned Cubs fans that “hope is dangerous thing” and that it “has no use for Cubs fans.” That is hardly consistent, or pro-hope.

The next time you crack your knuckles and prepare to write a column, please practice what you preach. If you’re going to challenge a room full of impressionable students to be independent thinkers and to deeply understand the issues at hand, be ready to show that you have taken the time to do the same.