Richard Roeper: 'Thuddingly dull'

"Thinking takes time." Unless you work at the Sun-Times and write a column. Then thinking is mostly optional.


Former Sun-Times Media Group colleague David Rutter sums up what every hard-working journalist must think about Richard Roeper here:

"As a writer, Roeper is a cheap date who occasionally delivers, and I sincerely hope that cheap dates don't take offense at being lumped in with Roeper. The thinking-to-drivel ratio on his Sun-Times work is about one in 10, which might be a function of being stretched too thin in The Roeper Media Empire. Thinking takes time. Glibness is not a counterweight to insight."

Wish I'd written that.

Rutter read Roeper's book on gambling and pronounced it lacking both in style and substance. Just like his columns.

"Richard Roeper has managed to take a modest amount of money in real gambler terms, pretend that gambling at a $1,000-a-day clip for a month is high drama, and produce a treatise that is incomprehensibly, thuddingly dull.

"Or maybe it's only that Roeper is dull."

With all the size and spending cutbacks at the Sun-Times, space in a newspaper is hard to come by. Not only does the paper waste precious newshole on his half-assed drivel, the dollars they spend to secure such glib driblets could be better spent on, oh, I don't know, investigative reporting, maybe. Or how about simply more reporters on the street finding stories about Chicago and Chicagoans.

Courageous reporting can really help a city. But it never ceases to amaze me how the courage required to confront the problems and misplaced priorities within a paper's own news and business operation is curiously absent.