FALL TV PREVIEW with SP Times' Eric Deggans and KC Star's Aaron Barnhart: Mr. Media Interview

Back in the early days following Al Gore’s invention of the Internet, there were a few hardy souls delivering content via something called “Netscape.”

One of those people, back in 1994, was me – Mr. Media. I started doing this as a syndicated weekly newspaper feature and web site back when newspaper editors didn’t know URLs from their – oh, never mind that.

One of the first compadres I encountered was Aaron Barnhart, who was writing something called “Late Show News,” which followed David Letterman, Jay Leno and a few other guys whose names are better left unsaid.

After five years, Aaron— the TV critic for the Kansas City Star —broadened his scope to all TV and changed the name of his web operation to TV Barn. He’s been at it ever since and is concerned a dean among his counterpart.

Eric Deggans hasn’t been a TV critic quite as long but he joined the St. Petersburg Times in 1995 and has spent 11 years covering TV and media. He’s also covered music and served on the paper’s editorial board.

Eric made his rep nationally by campaigning for greater representation of minorities in network television. You may have also seen him as a guest on Sunday morning talk shows, including CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

And he, like Aaron, runs a popular TV and media blog. His is called The Feed.

I’ve asked these guys–both of whom I considered old friends—to join us tonight to talk about the upcoming TV season and the future of technology on TV.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with KANSAS CITY STAR TV critic AARON BARNHART and ST. PETERSBURG TIMES TV and media critic ERIC DEGGANS by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Babs Wules! (The Feed)

“With Quaddafi, I said “Do you know there are some people who think that you’re mad?' I don’t say that I think you’re mad. He laughed and more or less answered the question. With Yeltsin, I asked 'You know about the rumors -- I’m sure you’ve read them sir -- that you drink too much.' There are ways of couching it. Often I’ll ask 'What’s the biggest misconception about you?' and they’ll bring the (controversial) matters up.”

-- Barbara Walters, promoting her new autobiography, Audition, in an interview with Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times.

Eric Deggans, "St. Petersburg Times" media critic, blogger: Mr. Media Interview

Eric Deggans is easily one of the smartest journalists I know. Okay, okay, I know some of you connect “smart” and “journalist” and chuckle the way other people combine “military” and “intelligence.” But trust me, Eric is really bright. He has his own way of looking at any topic and bringing aspects of it to light.

Currently the television and media critic for the St. Petersburg Times—and author of a media savvy blog called “The Feed"—Eric is filling a job the newspaper created specifically for him. Before serving as media critic, he sat on the newspaper’s editorial board and wrote bylined opinion columns specializing in race issues, pop culture, media, and national affairs. From 1997 to 2004, he worked as TV critic for the Times, crafting reviews, news stories, and long-range trend pieces on the state of the media industry, both locally and nationally.

Eric is also the president of the Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists. And, if you search his name on myspace.com, you’ll find he also worked in the 1980s as a professional drummer touring and performing with Motown’s The Voyage Band throughout the Midwest and in Osaka, Japan. He continues to perform in the Tampa Bay area with local bands and recording artists as a drummer, bassist, and vocalist.

You may also recognize Eric as a recurring panelist on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”


ANDELMAN: Eric, welcome to Mr. Media.

DEGGANS: Thanks. I’m going to spend the next half hour disproving everything you said about me being smart.

ANDELMAN: I have to build you up before I start to tear you down.

DEGGANS: Bring it on, pal.

ANDELMAN: You know how the media works. Let’s start with a big question: If you could change network TV in any way, what would you do?

DEGGANS: I would make the season shorter for new episodes, and I would more strictly enforce the decency guidelines, but I would make them looser at the same time. What I would do is, I would be a little more strict about trying to keep explicit content out of the 8 PM, the 8–9 PM hour in prime time, the first hour, but I would relax it a little at 9 PM, and I would really relax it at 10 PM, so that we would see more FX and HBO-type shows on network television, and they would have shorter runs, so you wouldn’t be forcing the guys from “Lost” to come up with 25 episodes of stuff when they really only have thirteen episodes of decent material in them. We would get more series, and frankly, I think they’d be better.

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting that you brought that up. We both have kids. Your view of these things changes once you become a parent.

DEGGANS: Definitely.

ANDELMAN: Ten years ago, I found the 8:00 – 9:00 family hour, which is what it was really referred to then, a real pain in the butt, because there was never anything on that I wanted to watch, and now in that hour, there is plenty of stuff I’d want to watch, but I can’t because I have a 10-year-old daughter, and we’ve found you really can’t watch… pick a show. It seems like in this climate for some reason, in the “family first” climate that we’re in and family values, there is no respect for that hour anymore. Does that surprise you, and have you changed your views since you’ve been a parent?

DEGGANS: I probably have changed my views a little bit because if you’re not a parent, then obviously you don’t care when explicit content airs on television, because it doesn’t affect you; you’re an adult. Once you become a parent and you are responsible for raising a child and sort of moderating and guiding their exposure to media, then it becomes more of a concern, because if you want to sit down with the family and watch TV at 8:00, what do you watch? And that’s the reason why these reality shows and these game shows have become so popular, “Deal or No Deal,” “American Idol,” “Dancing with the Stars,” “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?”

One of the reasons why these shows are so popular is because the whole family can sit down and watch them without fear. It’s a singing competition, or it’s a game show, so there is not going to be any cursing, there is not going to be any sex, and it’s interesting enough that everybody in the family wants to watch it. Why the networks have not figured out how to do that with fictional programming, I don’t know. My hunch is that sex jokes and curse words are an easy crutch for lame comedies and overly complex dramas. Frankly, I think it’s possible to do a comedy where there is not necessarily a lot of sex or where the language isn’t totally explicit. I let my kids watch “The Simpsons,” I let my kids watch “Seinfeld,” I let my kids watch “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Those are all shows that have some sex in them, and they have some explicit words in them occasionally, but it’s not a mainstay of the show, so I feel pretty good about watching it with them.





ANDELMAN: “Raymond” is a good example, I think.

DEGGANS: The best example.

ANDELMAN: It seems like on the whole, it’s a fun family show, and now it’s in repeats from like 7:00 – 8:00 PM, so it’s even earlier than the so-called “Family Hour,” but so many episodes start with Ray and his wife in bed, and he’s trying to get a little something, and that’s the opening of the show. My wife and I sit there looking at each other going, “Hmmm, we should change the subject. So Rach, what’s new? What did you do in school today?” Watching her with the left eye, and the right eye, we’re waiting to see if they’ve moved off of….

DEGGANS: I mean, from my standpoint, I have a two-year-old and she doesn’t pay attention to situation comedies. If it’s not a cartoon, she’s not interested. And then I have a 10-year-old, and I have a 12-year-old, and frankly, by the time my kids are at least 10 years old – know about sex, and they know that mommy and daddy have sex, and they know other people’s mommies and daddies have sex. So if there is a scene where Ray and his wife are in the bedroom and he’s making jokes about wanting to make love to her, they get that, they understand that.

ANDELMAN: I hope it mostly goes over their heads, since they’re not at that point. It’s like a lot of things as you go through the day that it just doesn’t strike them.

DEGGANS: Well, I don’t know. My experience with my girls is that they understand that, and they understand it in a way that totally makes sense. I mean, mommies and daddies do that. They get the humor of it. Frankly, I’m much more concerned about them seeing really violent stuff on TV, really bloody stuff….

ANDELMAN: Plenty of that at 8:00 o’clock.

DEGGANS: On TV, I am not concerned about the sex stuff. As long as the sex stuff isn’t really crude, and as long as it’s not really explicit, you know. One of the problems we have, for example, is that we like to watch “Law & Order” re-runs, and I don’t let my girls watch that with us, because there are too many mature themes in those shows. And you know, what 10-year-old needs to be aware that there are elements of that kind of stuff in the world?

ANDELMAN: Well, now, that’s interesting. I won’t watch those shows because I swear, it seems like every time – and my wife watches all of them – every time I sit down to watch one, it’s a story about a child endangered, a child killed, a child abused, a child molested, and I just think, there’s gotta be something else these script writers are thinking about!

DEGGANS: Well, I think maybe you just had bad luck, because I watch them a lot, and I don’t see a preponderance of those kinds of stories. But they do push the envelope in terms of explicit themes, so I don’t let my kids watch those shows with me. But I do think we ultimately need broadcasters to be more responsible about when they use explicit content in their shows, and if they were, I have a feeling that they’d be allowed to use it more often, and they’d be allowed to introduce material that is more explicit. But the problem is, we can’t trust them. They put “Friends” on at 8 o’clock, and there are lots of curse words in it, there are lots of explicit sexual situations. It was a great show, and because it did really well at 8 o’clock, that just created a whole trend that we have never been able to get away from.

ANDELMAN: That probably was the show that opened that up.

DEGGANS: It definitely was. It was a huge success at 8 o’clock. “Spin City” moved to 8 o’clock right after that, and because both of those shows did well in those time slots, the next thing you know, even the slight hesitation that the networks had about putting explicit content at 8 o’clock went away.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

"If I Did It": What, Me Worry?

Eric Deggans, TV and media critic for the St. Petersburg Times, scored a telephone interview with O.J. Simpson on Wednesday via Miami radio station WTPS 1080 AM. You can read more on his blog, "The Feed"; here are some highlights:

HOW WAS O.J. PAID? “There was a payment to me, and what was supposed to be the largest portion of it was handled by a corporation that my kids were involved in. They do stand to have a financial windfall....C’mon guys, let’s grow up. Will everybody stop being so naïve? Of course I got paid. I spent the money on my bills. It’s gone…I have a right to earn money if I can earn money. I don’t know why everybody is so confused about this.”

NOT GUILTY?: "I didn’t kill them – no matter what anybody else wants to say, I didn’t do it. Every book that was written about that – every blood book that was written by every lawyer and every family member and everybody close to that trial, is hypothetical. It’s hypothetical and its blood money – I said it in that Fox interview, before everybody complained. I agree with Goldman. I was hoping the book would never sell. I said it in the interview."

AND HOW ABOUT THAT "KRAMER" GUY MOUTHING OFF?: "It goes down to one thing: race. We all know that everybody wants to look the other way. You know darn well if Nicole and Ron were black, we wouldn’t be dealing with this situation. Michael Richard's comments will be forgotten a lot sooner than the Mel Gibson comments. They will never forgive him – the Jewish people will never forgive (Gibson) – and this country will hold him accountable a lot longer than they’re going to hold Michael Richards accountable.”