House of Eratosthenes

It starts with the “Airhead Woman’s Section” of the Sacramento Bee. You know what I’m talking about, every significant metropolitan newspaper has such a section. The Bee calls it “Scene” and, if memory serves (since I haven’t double-checked for at least a decade or so) “Time & Money” on Sundays. Your local paper may call it “Lifestyles” or “Family” or “Fun” or…you get the picture. The name varies, the substance stays the same. This is where crossword puzzles go. “Dumb & Dumber,” a.k.a. Ann Landers and Dear Abby, go here. Dating advice. Pet advice. Bridge strategies. And of course my own guilty pleasure, the funnies. Stuff for people who want to read newspapers, but don’t really want to read newspapers. All this fluff is sucked into the section that bears a different name from one city to the next, like light fluffy lint into the trap of a dryer.

Creamer, depending on the day of the week, is on the bottom of Page 1 or on the sidebar of Page 2. She’s there to remind people that hey, don’t have too much fun, this is still a newspaper. So the content of her writing concerns topics that are serious, like serious as a heart attack, but the analytical style is tailored for readers who are bordering on senility, or lack the capacity to noodle things out beyond some elementary level. Not really striving for Aristotelian or Socratean logic-crunching here. She’s the Angel of Death of the “fluffy marshmallow” section, anchoring it down into gloomy reality.

But not in such a way that complicated subjects are made to be easily understood. It’s more like complicated subjects are whittled down into something that no longer resembles what they really are, so that the simpler version can then be understood.

Now, Ann Coulter has written a book on one of her favorite topics, the further dissection of “liberals.” This time, Coulter is saying liberalism is a religion. Heady stuff. Whether you agree with Coulter or not, this is a subject for some fine, surgical-precision processing of empirical fact into well-refined and well-founded opinion. But Creamer isn’t about surgical-precision thinking…she’s all about subjects that are suitable for such thinking, but she’s also about yanking such serious subjects into the land of marshmallow clouds, licorice rainbows and candy cane mountains. And once the empirical, heart-attack-serious facts have been churned through Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, what emerges is a sticky mess (link requires registration):

By Monday, Coulter’s new book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list.

She clearly loves to cause a stir, and all the ruckus — book after book, TV appearance after TV appearance — has made her rich.

“Ann Coulter isn’t part of serious political discussion,” says Syracuse University pop culture expert Robert Thompson. “She has an act, and she plays it well.”

I have a rule about “experts.” If I’m being introduced to them in the same breath as I’m being told what their opinion is, I want to see something that gives this opinion some depth. Like another opinion from another expert who disagrees…or the credentials of the expert…or both. “He’s a pop culture expert” just doesn’t do it for me, y’know?

Oh sure, Professor Thompson is not the only one who thinks Coulter “isn’t part of serious political discussion.” He’s in great company there. The thing of it is, though, this is a matter of opinion…and there are a lot of people who have a different opinion. Therefore, logically, it becomes relevant to ask: Who is this guy?

Creamer didn’t want to tell me. This, I found to be fascinating, and more than a little suspicious. I don’t live in Creamer’s world. In my world, if I say a thing is so, and cite an “expert” who also says a thing is so, I want people to know who that expert is and what he does. It is in my interest to do so. Here is this extraordinarily controversial person named Ann Coulter, a person about whom I daresay everyone has an opinion, good or bad, save for those who have been living in a cave for the last decade give or take. And I am to take the opinion of some guy three thousand miles away as my own?

So I researched it. Wow, I’m glad I did.

I should hasten to begin by saying I don’t have anything overwhelmingly negative to say about this fellow. His opinions are so voluminous, on so many matters, that to analyze them would be a truly time-intensive task, one I have not undertaken let alone finished. And heck, for all I know maybe he’s a really nice guy. Seems to be. The beef I have with him, is this: He makes reporters’ jobs easier. Too much so. There’s no work left to be done.

Not real reporters. Phony reporters. He seems to be a “One Call Does It All” kind of guy. Indirectly, he’s responsible for sticking us newspaper readers with what are supposed to be “columns,” but in reality are nothing more than strips of meaningless crap.

That’s what this fellow found out. He was assigned to write about the Sony Playstation. Which he did, I guess, but the byproduct of his “research” is a fascinating expose on the Syracuse professor he was expected to call, what that professor does, and what this says about a once-great society now descending into a messy morass, in which nobody thinks for himself anymore.

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.
:
Thompson doesn’t coast; he has VCRs rolling constantly on each of his eight TVs. “Sometimes, when I get my paycheck and I’m feeling guilty that my job’s too easy, I just think, well, I did have to watch ‘Bette’ and ‘The Geena Davis Show’ this week.”

He turns down interview requests when he has nothing to say, though that’s rare. He has also paid his dues, having been fired from the State University of New York (Cortland) in the early 1990s because, as he saw it, the university considered the TV program expendable. At Syracuse, he found a tenured home. The dean of the Newhouse School of Journalism encouraged him to open the Popular Television Center.
:
The first quote came in 1986, a comment about “St. Elsewhere” in the health section of the Washington Post. The first big break arrived a few years later, when “60 Minutes” featured Thompson in a piece on television courses in academia. Gradually, his reputation spread.

Still, he’s not the least bit concerned about overexposure. As far as he can tell, the other side, the predictable knee-jerkers, has been getting most of the airtime for too long.
:
“At last, television is beginning to reflect the world as we really see it,” he said. “Up until the early 1970s, you could have a show that took place in the Marine Corps without ever mentioning Vietnam. ‘Leave It to Beaver’ debuts with the Sputnik and ends with the Kennedy assassination, and there’s never mention of Cuba or Communism.”

“The PlayStation,” he says, “is the thing that begins to show the texture of American life.”

Concise, logical, weighty: Somebody should quote that guy.

The point was not lost on this online resource, either. Editors there did a simple Google query, which anyone can do, and the results were striking. It seems that being an “expert” is, indeed, a full time job, but not in the way you might have thought.

You might remember Bobby T. as .. being quoted or paraphrased in at least one-third of the articles you read on media, pop culture and even gay marriage. And since you can find Robert in so many of the nation’s finest publications (which are different from those silly propaganda disseminators, of course), we like to offer a helpful roundup of recent sightings, courtesy of Google News…

…and thereafter is an impressive list of Thompson tidbits. The list isn’t that overwhelming in length, it’s the disparity of the topics that is striking.

This guy’s job, it appears, is to get quoted. Like I said, One Call Does It All. Anita Creamer writes “Ann Coulter’s a vicious halfwit,” and this is not acceptable — column not completed. She calls Professor Thompson, Professor Thompson says exactly the same thing, and HEY! We got a quote. From a source. An expert. Column complete.

In other words, lazy journalism.

I don’t mean to pick on poor Anita, maybe she works hard most of the time. But this was lazy. Lots of people say Ann Coulter has nothing to do with serious political discussions. Lots of other people say, she certainly does.

But very few people, I would suppose, are sitting around wondering “gee, I’d sure like to know what that expert on pop culture over at Syracuse, Professor Robert Thompson, has to say about Ann Coulter.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think people are lining up for that one.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

QuoteboyFriday, June 16th, 2006

Quoteboy
Friday, June 16th, 2006