Professor Robert J. Thompson sat deep within the heavy, concrete confines of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications yesterday.
Suddenly, his phone rang.
"Hold on," he said. "I think this is TV Guide."
Such an occurrence is natural for Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. The center helps quantify the effects of television and other media on the general public.
"I talk to about 12 to 20 journalists a day, which I really enjoy," Thompson said.
The Center for the Study of Popular Television is not really a center at all. There are no buildings to accommodate this media hub. It rests primarily in the hands, and office, of this one man.
"We provide expertise to the press," Thompson said. "We hope to take information from the classroom, sound bite at a time, to some pretty large coalition audiences."
With numerous appearances on "60 Minutes," "48 Hours," "Dateline," "20/20" and the "Early Show," Thompson has built himself a steady niche in the media as a go-to source for popular culture criticisms.
A search for Bob Thompson or the Center for the Study of Popular Television on Lexis-Nexis or Google brings forth hundreds of quotes and stories that rely very heavily on this man's expertise.
"Databases like Lexis-Nexis perpetuate the number of phone calls I get, which is good news," Thompson said. "The bad news is that anybody can find these older quotes and I am asked about varied topics, but I don't mind it."
For instance, a few months back, Thompson was asked about the sudden influx in the number of storage sheds popping up in Los Angeles. When other like-minded journalists tackle this issue, they can refer to journalistic databases and find a number of archived articles on the topic. Thompson is quoted in nearly all of them.
Thompson says that about 40 percent of the interviews he grants are about television; the remainder concern other pop culture inquiries. He prefers the cultural questions to the innumerable interviews about the final season of "Friends." Instead of fielding such questions by gushing about Ross and Rachel's relationship, Thompson tries to put the answers into a larger perspective.
"First of all, they're always looking for a credential," Thompson said. "If you've got that, it's a question of whether or not you're available. If you give them anything with intelligence, they'll come back."
But the focus of the Center for the Study of Popular Television is not for one man to remark his way into as many publications as possible. The scope is much broader.
Aside from offering interviews to the press, the center has also published a series of books about television. According to the center's Web site, the book series aims to provide readers with serious, concise and readable sources for popular television as a creative and artistic medium. The center also maintains and constantly adds to a growing archive of television shows, publications and other pop culture works.
"Our mission is to convince people that popular television merits serious study," said David M. Rubin, dean of Newhouse. "We aim to use television content to help students and others to develop their critical faculties."
The Center for the Study of Popular Television is the creation of Rubin, who had aspirations to create a one-of-a-kind institution that fosters understanding of the level of influence and importance of popular television.
"I knew Thompson would perfect for this," Rubin said. "It's good publicity for him and great publicity for the Newhouse school as well."
Since its inception, the center has developed into what Rubin and Thompson had hoped it would become.
"I think it's done a lot of good things," Rubin said. "We've had many speakers, written books, and we're building our archive. So I believe we're doing some valuable work."
The idea behind such an establishment is for a larger audience - like the American public - to more fully understand television and other popular media.
"We want the impact (of the center) to be like that felt by Thompson's students," Rubin said. "We would like people to be more analytical in their thinking of popular culture, more thoughtful."
"We want to do to TV and pop culture what the English department does to plays and poems," Thompson said. "We take it seriously for what it is, in and of itself."
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