(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - The sheer amount of media generated and consumed in the United States every day is simply staggering.

Today's guest reminds us that the stories we tell tell us something about ourselves, whether those stories are about music or politics or race.

He's Eric Deggans this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Eric Deggans, a TV critic and media analyst you know from his work on NPR and for his book, "Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation."

He joins us today from Florida.

Eric, thank you so much for being with us.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

- You know, we were chatting a little bit, your career has been remarkable and I've been following you for a long time.

One of the things that has always struck me about your writing is the heart, the personal stories, the personal experiences that you bring to it that I often find quite moving, and I'm wondering where that sense of self, that sense of authenticity comes from in your work.

- Okay.

Why?

I guess I would name two sources for that.

I would name my dad, who was a columnist who wrote for the dominant local newspaper where I was growing up, the "Post-Tribune" in Gary, Indiana.

And he also wrote for a bunch of Black-centered independent newspapers like "Gary Info" and the "Crusader" in Gary in Chicago.

But I'd also name Stan Lee, who was the creator of the "Fantastic Four" and "X-Men" and all of these great Marvel comic books.

When I was young, I was a serious comic book nerd, and I spent a lot of time reading Marvel comic books because they felt more realistic and because there was more personality in them.

And one of the things that I learned from reading Stan Lee is not to be afraid to have your own voice and how powerful a distinctive voice could be and how powerful it would be to take your own experiences and use them as sort of the building blocks for any of the storytelling that you wanted to do.

And so, as I sort of developed as a journalist, or before I was even a journalist, as I developed as a media consumer, I started reading people like as Isaac Asimov and Mike Royko and Erma Bombeck and Roger Ebert.

Now, these are all very different writers, but one thing they all have in common is that they have a really strong sense of voice, and they're able often to write first person's narratives that are very gripping and that are very personal.

And so I think all of those things sort of stitched together to help me create the style that I use now professionally as a journalist.

- So you mentioned Stan Lee, so I have to ask, with great power comes great responsibility, you know, as a nationally known media critic, do you feel that kind of responsibility with the power that you have with your audience?

- I think people constantly overestimate the power (everybody laughing) that people in media have over their audience.

The way I talk about it is I feel like I'm putting messages in a bottle and I'm just constantly sending out these stories, impressions, analyses, interviews.

And, you know, I feel like I have a consistent and sort of evolving vision of what media is, what society is, what race is, how politics is going, all of those things.

And so I just keep sending these messages out.

And hopefully they reach people and hopefully they move them.

But it is not nearly as direct and as immediate an effect as I would want or maybe other people imagine.

- So, Eric, one of the really fascinating things that we read in your bio was your time on the Motown label touring as a drummer.

And you still tour, or you still sometimes play.

- I still play.

I don't tour.

(Jim laughs) - Okay.

Well, maybe you'd have to go back on the road.

But when we look back over the remarkable body of work you've created as a media critic, we noticed that music plays such an important role in your reporting.

Going all the way back to a 2014 article about "Purple Rain" and music, Legend Prince.

Did your experience as a musician, does it inform you in a way that perhaps it doesn't other media critics?

- I've been playing drums now for more than 40 years, and when I was in college, I was in a band that got signed to Motown, and we recorded an album for them.

Unfortunately, the label got sold before our record could come out, and then they dropped almost everybody on the label.

But we did, I did experience what it was like to get signed to a major label record deal, to get the advance, to go to Chicago, to record the record, and then to constantly sort of be put on the back burner and be given the run around by this company that was positioning itself for a sale.

So I, you know, once I came out of that experience, I had all I had told everyone in my life, I told people at the journalism school at Indiana University where I was going, that I was gonna take a couple years off.

I was gonna pursue this thing.

And then if it didn't work out, I was gonna come back to school, get my degree, and pursue work as a journalist.

And that's what I did, with an eye towards becoming a pop music critic.

And, which I also did.

And I found that when I was doing that work, I understood how the music industry worked in a way that other critics didn't because I'd been a part of it.

I'd been an artist, I'd been a musician.

My first job as a music critic was in New Jersey.

I was the music critic for the "Asbury Park Press," and that's the hometown newspaper for Bruce Springsteen.

- [G. Wayne] Springsteen, yeah.

- And Bon Jovi and The Smithereens and a bunch of bands.

And a friend of mine that I had played in bands with in college was actually playing behind Bruce Springsteen at the time.

And another friend of mine that I used to sub for him on gigs, the drummer Shawn Pelton, he's been the drummer for "Saturday Night Live" for 20 years.

So all my connections as a musician helped me when I became a pop music critic because I had access to people and I had access to experiences that other people didn't.

And, you know, as I said in the earlier answer, it's all about bringing what's unique about you to the work.

So what's unique about me is not only my perceptions as, you know, a media nerd and a science fiction nerd and a Black man in, you know, a white-dominated society, but it's also being a musician, a lifelong musician.

And, you know, I still play with people today and, you know, I just had the pleasure of doing a story about the 40th anniversary of "Purple Rain."

That record came out 40 years ago last June.

And the film came out a month later.

And I got a chance to interview Melvoin and Bobby Z., the drummer for the Revolution, and Morris Day, the lead singer for the time.

And, you know, you know, college age me who watched that movie in a darkened theater at my sophomore year in college and then went on to live that, you know, I was in a band that almost fell apart until we got signed by Motown, and then we had a hit record that just galvanized people behind the band.

I lived the story of that movie.

So that then 40 years later talked to the people who were actually in the movie about what their experiences were like and to be able to tell them how much they inspired me and all the other musicians that were coming up at the time, that was really a gift.

And that's an amazing, that's what's amazing about doing this job is that you never know when the opportunity will come to reach back and utilize this knowledge that you've gained from doing these other things that you can bring to what you're doing now.

And, you know, I got to interview Prince about five months before he died.

I was amongst a group of Black journalists who talked to him at Paisley Park when he invited members of the National Association of Black Journalists to come visit him.

So, you know, just being able to have all these different things in your life, I think it makes your work richer.

And I think it also allows you to talk about these subjects in a more informative and illuminating way than if you just sort of had this sort of surface level, you know, interaction with them if you were just somebody who listened to music or just somebody who liked the record.

- So Prince compared record contracts to slavery.

And I don't know if it came out of that interview that you were just talking about or not.

Has anyone other than Taylor Swift managed to have control of her entire career, her entire label, or her entire discography?

- Well, you know, I mean, it's a complicated story, but Taylor Swift had quite a journey, and eventually wound up just re-recording a lot of her biggest hits so that she had full control over the masters of those records.

You know, it's a long, the music industry has changed a lot.

When I was in it, you counted on a record company to deliver a lot of different things.

You know, money to record.

You had to record, you know, major label records in major studios, and that cost a lot of money.

And you also counted on them to promote the album once it came out.

And indeed, touring was all about promoting the record because the record was where everybody made their money.

Now, that is completely flipped.

People don't buy records nearly as much as they used to.

The nexus of moneymaking for musical artists has moved to live performances and merchandise.

And so one reason why somebody like Taylor Swift can take control of her career is that the major amount of her money is coming from these gigantic shows, this gigantic tours that she's doing, and all the merchandising that's associated with them.

And, you know, she rerecorded a lot of her records so that she could have control of them.

When I interviewed Prince, he was talking about the streaming revolution and how it was affecting artist control of their music.

He had taken his songs for the most part off of Spotify and off of most streaming services, and he was presenting them on TIDAL, which was a streaming service that was created by Jay-Z and some partners that was supposed to be more artists-focused.

He was very concerned about artists, songwriters, retaining control of the material that they create.

He talked about feeling insulted because he felt that Apple wasn't willing to pay him what they paid the Beatles to have the Beatles material on iTunes.

And so that's why he wasn't making his material available to Apple Music back then.

His estate has since kind of reversed that.

And you can find much of his work on Spotify and Apple Music now.

But, you know, he was very focused on that.

That's a very important thing for artists.

And what artists are realizing now is that because they can create their own promotion, they can create their own websites, they can create their own tours, they don't need the apparatus of the record industry as much as they used to when I was in it.

And in a way, you can make, a lot of artists can make a better living because they have, they get a greater percentage of the profits from what they're doing because they're touring and they're selling merchandise directly to fans.

So the music business has changed quite a bit.

Taylor Swift, of course, is a great example, but what she's pulling off is something that only a few elite artists can really access.

Most of the artists that are coming up now have very different challenges than she had.

- You know, does this change in the music industry?

And in my mind, it aligns with changes in media in general, where there's almost a democratization of creative content, where you don't need the big studios, you don't need the big labels to necessarily produce good work.

Does that- - Well- - Does that change the society as a whole because we're not all talking about the same artists the way we were 30 years ago?

- Well, you know, as critics, we talk a lot about the decline of the monoculture, is what we call it.

You know, this idea that at one point, there was mainstream TV shows that most people who were fans of TV watched.

There was certain kinds of music that most people who were fan, most people who were fans of, say, rock and roll or pop music would listen to.

And that monoculture has been obliterated by all the choices that are made available to you by digital technology.

What's happened is that digital technology has slowly and not so slowly begun to disrupt all the different kinds of entertainment that are out there.

So in terms of music artists, what it's done is it's destroyed the value of the album and it's destroyed the moneymaking potential of the album.

And it's sort of destroyed this setup that the music business had for decades, where a few hit makers would fuel an industry that was signing tons of artists and pushing them at the public.

And then a few people would, like Taylor Swift, would make tremendous amounts of money, and it would fuel everything.

That has all fallen apart.

In television, what's happened is that the audience is moving from more traditional forms of television, like cable TV and broadcast television, they're moving to streaming.

And, you know, media outlets make a lot less money on people who are on streaming services versus people who might be watching on platforms where advertising is at play.

And you still have a situation where big tech firms, like Google and Amazon, may control big parts of that process.

If you have a video on YouTube that does a ton of viewers and you even get some advertising revenue from it, well, you're sharing that advertising revenue with Google.

If you have a video on Facebook that goes viral or a video on Instagram that goes viral, well, Meta gets a cut of those profits because it's on their platform.

So what's happened is there's been this tremendous amount of disruption, and then different power brokers emerge.

We're not talking so much about, you know, the president of a broadcast network, we're talking about Mark Zuckerberg, or we're talking about Elon Musk, or we're talking about the people who run Google.

And so people are in television, are still, in film, are still trying to figure out what that means for the medium.

But in its most basic form, people are moving from one platform to another, and more and more people are watching and getting their TV fixed from online platforms.

And then the industry has to figure out how to make money from that and how to make money in a way that makes sense for an industry that was focused on broadcast television and cable television for so long.

- Yeah, Eric, there's so much that we wanna ask you about today.

I just wanna ask one more question about music.

- Sure.

- So you've, you've written powerfully about different examples of protest music and the power of music in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

One of our earliest guests was Bernard Lafayette, who moved us in the studio with a song that we had never heard before, but that was something that was dear to him.

With everything that everybody recognizes is going on in the world now, should be surprised or shocked that there isn't, that there aren't more examples of current protest songs that have a bigger audience.

Or is that just, does that go hand in hand with what you just described about the evolution of the industry?

- Yeah, it's something that I've heard people ask every so often, why aren't there more protest songs?

People ask that particularly I think in the wake of 9/11, when the Iraq War started and there was a lot of pushback, and people were wondering, where are the artists?

You know, we had a lot of anthems about Vietnam, why didn't we have that sort of thing when the Iraq War kicked off?

You know, my sense is just that this generation expresses those things in a different way.

And what you see is memes on social media.

You don't necessarily see protest songs in the same way that you used to.

You know, the baby boom generation didn't have online technology, they didn't have social media, they didn't have in TikTok and Instagram and X/Twitter.

So their version of that was protest songs.

I think now we've seen a lot of that energy move to social media, where people can speak sort of directly, and you don't have to be a songwriter to stand up and try to move a whole bunch of people to follow the ideas that you have, the protests that you have, the point that you wanna make about what's going on.

So I think one reason why we've seen less is just that it's moved to a different space.

I did a piece about the etymology, about the history of this little light of mind.

That's probably what you're talking about.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- We had at NPR this series called "American Anthem," where we talked about different songs that could be considered anthems in America that maybe people didn't consider that way.

And it was interesting to look back and see that the fellow who was credited for writing that song, when I finally reached back and found an archivist who, Moody's Bible Institute, the guy who was credited with writing that song had been a teacher there, and he had a lot of papers there and stuff.

And after talking to them, we realized that he had done an arrangement of it, but it was likely a song that was just part of the dynamic.

It was something that had happened in churches and in fields, and this guy heard it, and then he did an arrangement of it and it became popular.

And so then he began, he got credit as the person who wrote it, but, you know, Moody's corrected us and said, "Hey, he didn't write it, he arranged it."

And all of a sudden, we start to realize that there is this long, strong thread all the way from the fields, where workers worked as enslaved people and Indigenous servants to the churches where they sang their hearts out on Sunday to the protests where the descendants fought for their rights in the 1960s to today, where we still sing these songs in church, we still sing these songs at protest, and we still use them to inspire and uplift people.

So, you know, it's a grand tradition, but I do think that tradition has moved online and that's where we're seeing that energy these days.

- So Eric, we're gonna switch gears here and go to the presidential election, which is coming up in just a couple of months here.

How do you think the cable news and mainstream networks covered the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race, and now, the early days of the Harris-Waltz campaign?

Again, a big question, but if you can give us- - Sure.

- A summary of your reaction, what you see, your analysis.

- Sure.

Well, you know, one of the things that I've noticed is that there, there seems to be a lot of frustration on all sides of the political divide about mainstream media coverage and how major media outlets are covering politics.

And leading up to Joe Biden's decision to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris, you know, mainstream media outlets were getting a lot of criticism from people who supported Biden for trying to report on his health and trying to get a sense of whether his administration was being honest with the public about his physical challenges.

And there's so much at stake with this election.

It is so obviously a choice between two starkly different candidates that people on all sides are highly emotional, they're very tense, they're watching coverage very closely, and they're quick to object to anything that they feel is unfair.

And, you know, journalism is difficult under the best circumstances, but in circumstances like this, it's a high-pressure environment.

And journalists are only human.

You know, we're gonna make mistakes.

There's gonna be major media outlets that do terrible jobs, but they also do amazing work.

So we did have journalism before Joe Biden decided to step down that indicated he was having physical problems, that indicated that there were people who had met him at fundraisers and were surprised that the physical challenges that he had, and were saying that he seemed to zone out at times.

And, you know, his administration was saying that was unfair.

But I think we've now learned that there was a strong reason for that reporting.

And people need to understand that sometimes it's journalist job to tell 'em things they don't want to hear, or tell them things that might be uncomfortable to hear.

And even when it seems like there's an election, where the choices between authoritarianism and democracy, you have to honestly report on both sides.

And I'm not saying the media has gotten it right all the time.

I'm not even saying the media has necessarily gotten it right most of the time, but I am saying that most of the people that I know that are working this story are people who are doing it in good faith.

And all they really want to do is get to the heart of every issue and make sure people are as informed as possible when they go into the voting booth in November.

And I hope people keep that in mind.

I do think that there is a role for the constant watchdogging that the public has been doing, because there are times when media can have a knee-jerk way of covering things or can fall into patterns that are not necessarily fair or don't necessarily illuminate things.

So I think the criticism is necessary, but I also hope that people bring a little understanding with that and try to bear in mind that it is a difficult job, that journalists are human, and that sometimes the assumptions they're making about why things happen the way they are are just not true.

- You know, Eric, we've got literally about 90 seconds left, but you are a long time member of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Their annual convention made some news when former President Donald Trump appeared on a panel.

You know, again, literally we've got about 90 seconds left here.

Your thoughts about that panel before it happened and after it happened.

- Sure.

The group has always invited the top major party nominees during a presidential election year.

So it was not unusual for both Biden and Trump to be invited.

Biden had originally agreed, but then when he dropped out of the race, there was difficulty in securing Kamala Harris's participation.

And Trump unexpectedly said yes.

Normally, the Republican candidate turns us down and the Democratic candidate accepts.

Once he was there, I wasn't a big fan of the format that they had chosen for the interview.

I felt they had, they should have done more to set it up, so it would've been harder for him to lie.

But they asked him the questions that our members wanted to know, which was, you've done things that on their face seem very racist, how do you explain them?

And he explained them by insulting the people who were asking them the question and insulting the group.

And so even though he didn't necessarily directly answer the questions, he did answer the questions in a way, and he revealed himself in a way that has led people to still talk about that appearance, even now, about a month later.

So I do think it was important.

I do think that it made sense that it happened.

I wasn't a great fan of how the panel was formatted, but I think in the end, people learned what they needed to learn.

- That's the power of journalism, right?

Eric Deggans, NPR, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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