So Aaron Fitt of New Hampshire wants to talk about Fayetteville, instead of sports, in a sports column. His brilliant analytical mind apparently stymied by the difficulty of actually analyzing the Tar Heels' woes this basketball season, he predictably takes the low road and writes a "humor" column regarding that plucky and oft put-down city. What's truly ironic is that, reading the headline of his article, I expected a report on the rumors of real world ACC expansion, a story that would actually be relevant to both "sports" and "The University of North Carolina," two things that would seem, to my uninitiated mind, to be important to include in any sports column in UNC's paper.
It is indeed a sad day when bashing a city and making no mention of athletics in a realistic sense passes for sports journalism in this paper.
Obviously, these minor relevancy issues did not dissuade our intrepid journalist from analyzing Fayetteville. This he does not only poorly and also in quite a stereotypical manner. Allow me to retort. Fitt fails to mention that Fayetteville's downtown is now a model for urban renewal throughout the South. Nor is it newsworthy that Fayetteville sends several Morehead Scholars to this university annually. The most perceptive comment Fitt makes, in fact, is to encourage readers to not "pick fights with drunken GIs." What remarkable insight! That ranks with "drugs are bad" and "ATN is slow" on the "obvious and cliched advice scale."
To conclude, the next time Fitt obviously has no relevant or interesting material for his column, I would suggest that the DTH let him off the hook and sell his space for advertising. It would almost certainly be more informative and objective than whatever other filler material he can come up with.
Dan Harrison
Sophomore
Political Science
