Eric Deggans
Speaker, TV and Media Critic
Fields of expertise:
These days, talk about race, social issues and media seems more difficult than ever.
Cable news pundits whip up angry diatribes based on misinformation and disinformation. Websites generate massive amounts of pageviews with stories rooted in shoddy information and deliberately distorted images. Politicians encourage supporters to hate and fear marginalized groups, while misrepresenting important subjects like Critical Race Theory or the Black Lives Matter movement.
And, too often, caught in the middle, are people of goodwill with open minds who just need help sorting through the clutter.
That’s where Eric Deggans can help. A journalist, columnist, and author for more than 30 years, Eric has covered intersections of media, pop culture, race and social justice most prominently as a TV critic/media analyst/guest host at National Public Radio.
From interviews with notables like Oprah Winfrey, Prince, Sofia Vergara and Samuel L. Jackson to stories featuring black people who were stereotyped and marginalized while competing on CBS’ reality TV hit Survivor, Eric has produced work which urges us all to reconsider the myths America tells itself about race, history, culture and modern media with an eye toward dismantling systemic prejudice and increasing equity for everyone.
Eric’s central presentation “Building Bridges, Not Walls: Decoding Media’s Confusing Coverage of Race, Inclusion, Culture and Politics” offers loads of insight on the current moment. Topics include: explanations of white privilege and anti-racism; why “cancel culture” should really be called “consequence culture”; and the four types of racism which most often derail media outlets, while inhibiting our own personal conversations on race and difference.
At National Public Radio, Eric helps an audience of millions decode confusing messages on race, inclusion and society filling today’s media platforms. He speaks about such issues regularly on TV platforms like CNN, MSNBC and PBS, and at conferences like the Texas Tribune Festival and South By Southwest. He’s written a book on how media outlets leverage prejudice to build profits, called Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. And he teaches a class at Duke University aimed at dissecting how systemic racism distorts media messages, reflecting America’s tortured history of progress and backlash on civil rights.
Now, he can deliver that material in personal presentations filled with entertaining, incisive insights.
