Friday, Jul 25, 2008
How one professor turned into a pop culture pundit, where he stands on "C.H.i.P.S" and why he's quoted regularly in the New York Times.
Mar 7, 2001 | I was desperate the first time I called Robert Thompson. An editor at Spin had assigned me to write a story about the pervasiveness of the Sony PlayStation on network TV. It was a fine idea. The only problem that was I'd never used the game console, and certainly hadn't noticed that UPN had squeezed it into the latest "Moesha" script. In other words, I found myself in the same position as the other 1,273 hacks instructed to produce a trend piece about the PlayStation.
A colleague mentioned Thompson, who taught at Syracuse University and had something smart to say about virtually any subject related to television. It got better. Thompson ran the very official-sounding Center for the Study of Popular Television. The New York Times described him as an expert on pop culture.
Thompson returned my call quickly. I pitched a few softballs on what I decided would be a piece about product placement. He started riffing like Yngwie Malmsteen.
It was as if Thompson kept a log of every boob-tube mention of the video game character Crash Bandicoot. Actually, he virtually did. "By the time something is hot enough to be a feature story," he said, "if we've been doing our jobs as scholars and academics, we've already done our thinking."
Over the next couple of days, I interviewed a few obvious sources, including PlayStation fans (the creator of "Felicity," the bald guy from "Just Shoot Me") and critics (a left-leaning, anti-corporate watchdog named John Stauber).
During a break in my reporting, I thumbed through a stack of still-unread magazines. That's when I discovered why I could never again quote Robert Thompson.
In Newsweek, his name appeared not once, but twice, in separate articles only two weeks apart. Big deal? Then I tried a search on Lexis-Nexis.
Ouch. Dr. Bob got more star time than silicone-enhanced breasts at an XFL halftime show. The New York Daily News, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Orange County Register, Knight-Ridder, the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. (He's also been quoted by Salon.)
Thompson was on top of everything. "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire." "Baywatch." "Mary Tyler Moore." Game shows. Thompson even effortlessly turned a Los Angeles Times piece on storage sheds -- storage sheds! -- into an honors thesis. "Behind the doors of storage sheds," he told reporter Jill Leovy, "is really the great American story: the accumulation of stuff."
Damn, he was good.
I promptly sliced him out of my piece.
Why? Part of the reason was the influence of Eric Alterman's "Sound and Fury," which I read in college. In that book, Alterman identified the punditocracy, a group that includes George Will, Robert Novak and John McLaughlin. Beyond being lazy and hopelessly out of touch, they are rotated through the talk show circuit as experts on virtually any topic. Even at my lowest journalistic moment, I wanted to avoid slipping into that kind of pack. Deleting Thompson's testimony felt deliciously subversive.
But it was also completely ineffective. He was everywhere. In January 2001 alone, a Thompson quote ran in some publication at least once a day -- not in academic journals but in virtually every newspaper in the country.
In December, New York Times writer Heidi Schuessler recruited Thompson for his thoughts on the Big Mouth Billy Bass, the mounted, rubber and plastic fish that sings "Take Me to the River." He talked about it like he was an expert. "You look at it and the intelligent side of your brain says, 'What is the world coming to?'" Thompson said. "Then the other side of your brain says, 'Cool, that fish just looked at me.'"
Then, Feb. 1, Thompson scored a hat trick with a quote in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, a Times Circuits story on Internet shopping and a Times sports desk story on the XFL. More recently, a Sunday New York Times piece by Allen St. John included four separate Thompson quotes, totalling 196 words. Dr. Bob deserved a byline.
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