I remember when I was working in Seattle, the first week I started, a photographer, very well-meaning guy, we were driving through a neighborhood that was considered a Black neighborhood, and he said to me, "So, you know, I want to give you the lay of the land. On feeling like Black communities were being overlooked by white newsrooms And I also could feel it in my career like I wasn't exactly the look of the time. And at that time, I knew I could not really compete in that sphere. It really is part of the reason why I transitioned out of news, because something happened in the mid 2000s where the look for television became even more vampy. I was always very aware of it and it was very stressful. So the first was the story that I was sharing with the public, but the other was my appearance. There was always like a script in my mind that was happening, two of them at the same time. Tonya Mosley Mosley reports live in 2003 from Fort Wayne, Ind., during her first on-camera job.Īnd so I was a very nervous television reporter. And while I really love adornment and I love expressing myself through my hair and makeup and clothing, for the purposes of my job, all I really cared about were the stories. We'd have consultants come in and talk with us about how to speak, what to wear, how to style our hair, what makeup to use. I always consider myself on the edge of "TV attractive." I believe that I'm attractive, but in the TV world, I was on the edge of that. On being judged for her appearance when she worked in TV news "That lets them not only understand the person I'm interviewing, but also understand my point of view as a Black person in this country." "If it's truly coming from my curiosities, then that will allow people to see things in a new and different way, or experience a topic that they thought they knew in a new way," she says. She vows to continue to lean into her own life experiences and curiosities as she joins the Fresh Air team. The newest season of the podcast examines the use of psilocybin to heal racial trauma as part of her reporting, Mosley went to a retreat in Jamaica to take mushrooms in a therapeutic setting. She is also the creator and host of Truth be Told, a Webby Award-winning podcast designed to be a safe space for Black people to talk to each other about a variety of subjects, including family, work, trauma and joy. She worked as the Silicon Valley bureau chief of KQED in San Francisco, and was an anchor of the midday news show Here & Now. In the 2000s, Mosley shifted into public radio. "I always had to fight against who I was in this moment to tell teams why we should care, which was pretty exhausting towards the end of my career in television." "I kind of became someone who had to explain Black culture to newsrooms or fight a little bit harder to cover stories on certain parts of town," Mosley says. In meetings, coworkers sometimes dismissed stories about the Black community as not interesting or newsworthy. Through it all, Mosley was frequently the only Black person in the newsroom, which left her feeling scrutinized, "like I had to be better than everyone else, or I had to make sure that I was twice as good, because if I make one mistake, everyone, their eyes are on me," she says. She worked her way up to became a producer for the morning and afternoon shows in Columbia, Mo., then branched out as a TV reporter in several cities, including Seattle and Louisville. But in her senior year of college, she landed a job as a teleprompter operator at the local ABC affiliate, which launched her into TV news. Mosley grew up in Detroit in the 1980s and '90s, and attended the University of Missouri with the intention of becoming a print journalist. "And because of how he exposed me to news, I then became interested in it. He had the radio on in his home all the time," Mosley says. It's a passion she traces back to her grandfather. For as long as she can remember, Tonya Mosley, the new co-host of Fresh Air, always wanted to be a journalist.
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