Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
Welcome to the latest edition of one hundred The Ed
Gordon Podcast. Today a conversation with broadcaster, author, and critic Torray.
Since the early nineties, the Massachusetts native has been a
mainstay in the media, from music to politics. He shared
his insight his essays and magazines and websites, his novels,
(00:44):
and his hosting programs on various cable networks as allowed
him to be ubiquitous on the media scene. His latest novel,
The Ivy League Counterfeitter, was recently released, and his latest show,
Masters of the Game can be found on the Grio TV.
We started out by talking about the changing face of media.
(01:08):
Hey man, first of all, thank you so much for
being on the podcast. Man, excited to have you come on. Man,
I've been watching you and molding after you first. I mean,
like you were the guy who was like I can
be august and serious at news and yet have that
(01:29):
black flavor to it, so we know, you know, we're
at home. This is our guy. He's not coming out
of his face to where the white people are like,
just not appropriately. This is the flavor and the style
that you could take to a CNN or MSNBC because
our people know, like he's still down with us, and
the white people know he's serious, and professionals like you
(01:50):
were setting that standard. Man. I was appreciate that. Man.
You know, I get that a lot because I've been
doing this since my hair was black, So I I
appreciate that. But but let me ask you of that.
That's where I was gonna go anyway. You know, it's
interesting you're about a decade younger than I am, and
I would say that my group, which there aren't many
left who are still doing it, many of them have
(02:12):
retired in all, but mine was the last, I think,
bashion of that old school journalism. And then when your
group came in, there was this melding of what you
could be and what was acceptable, and you know, you
could be hard news and you could be pop culture,
and there was this cross of the two which was
(02:34):
really fought in my generation. What do you think about
journalism today and what we see one of the I mean,
one of the big differences I see between a lot
of folks of your generation and mine in terms of broadcasting.
You guys felt like the broadcasters should be objective and
so you shouldn't be foisting your opinion on us. We
(02:57):
didn't know how Walter Cronk voted. Dan Rather Peter Jennings,
We didn't know how we're supposed to not know how
they voted, and I don't think they're the way they
covered things. Uh suggested that by the time I came around,
it was kind of like, I need you to know
where I what I feel, because I'm not giving you
(03:21):
the precise, honest portrait if you have no idea where
I stand um, and I'm not giving you the proper
context if I say both of these things are both
these ideas are reasonable? The left sides? Is this the
right side? Now? That is not a criticism of the
prior generation. I think you guys came up in a time,
(03:41):
especially in terms of politics, when the left and the
right had a morally equal value, and by the time
I got in the air in a news context there
was that was not at all the case. The right
was already going completely off the deep end. There are
even looks written about how the right was going off
(04:01):
the deep end. And so you know, to just say, well,
the left says this and the right says this, I'm
like that would be dishonest because we have to put
it into context and talk to the viewers about what's
really going on, um and especially since then the right
continues to lie in gas light much more and work
off of faux outrage, where if I'm not saying this
(04:25):
that they are saying is not true, then I'm not
serving you. And in that I was looking at you know,
Rachel Maddow, Lawrence o'donald, Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris, Perry, Joy Reid,
who were doing that similar sort of thing, um and
and letting you know, like audience, I can tell you
(04:46):
what's really going on here. And I thought that was
a more effective relationship between media and the audience rather
than just saying, rather than just pretending like I'm a
window pane just showing you what's going on. I worry
now that we've gone too far on the other side
that all we get is opinion and it's hard to
(05:08):
parse and parcel quote facts. I put that in quote
um from what we see, because the other side will
say I'm not saying either as objective. Gas lighting comes
from the left, and you know it's it's just opinion
and the like it. Is there room to find more
(05:28):
middle ground or or do you think that there's no
room because the extremes don't want to find the middle.
You know, I don't I don't think that both sides
and the political conversation are doing the same thing, are
approaching it in the same way. So you know, for
(05:50):
for example, for a CNN to have a straight laced
anchor come on and say, you know, there's two sides
to this issue. Here's one person for one and one
person from the other side, and and let them both
say whatever they want to say without fact checking them
in real time. That Uh, that does not serve the
(06:10):
audience well, but does not have people walking away with
more information about the situation, especially when you're talking about
something that's really fraught like climate change. Uh, you know,
police violence, mass incarceration, where the right is going to
come on and lie and fear monger. Um. You know, look,
there's nothing as a lefty that I believe where there's
(06:34):
a community of experts saying that's not true. Most of
the major positions on the right, the community of experts
who objectively study these sorts of things say that's not
accurate in terms of their approach to you climate science,
mass incarceration, police violence, race in general, abortion. We could
(06:57):
go on and on taxation, voter I D and the
entire approach to voting. They are constantly saying the big lie.
They're constantly saying things and and dealing in things that
are not true. So, like, you know, when I was
at MSNBC, I experienced people who were extremely smart, who
(07:19):
are working very hard to get it right and to
tell the truth as best as they knew it. Fox
News is performance are and I really don't think it's
right to put both of them in the same sentence.
I mean, I've have long felt, like, you know, saying MSNBC,
CNN and Fox News is like saying, you know, the
(07:40):
l A Clippers, the l A Lakers and the Harlem Globetrotters.
They're doing something fundamentally different. I think CNN wants to
be a center position. I think sometimes they're setups, their
segments aren't helping the public. You know, John Oliver had
(08:01):
a visualization of this, I think it was in his
first season where he was like, you know, well, we
could do the climate debate like this, here's one scientist
from one side and here's one science from another side,
but that would not be accurate. This would be accurate,
And then like two people with lab coats came in
and we're like, these are all the people who are
saying climate science is real, and here's the one guy
(08:24):
who says it's not. And you know what they didn't
say is by the way that guy has bought and
paid for by coke industries, He's not really telling you
what he really thinks. He's telling you what coke industries
wants you to know. You know. So, I mean like
so many issues are are like that, and I think
people are being naive if they think both sides are
lying both sides are equally bad. No, that is not
(08:47):
the case. I talked to a lot of people who
are just tired of the noise period, and even those
who are clearly liberal, I feel that both sides have
gone by no means I'm saying equally, by no means
am I saying equally, but have gone too far. You
know when you when you turned on CNN who tried
(09:07):
to play it down the middle when they when clearly
they weren't. Sometimes it can be just a sprinkle of context, right,
Like I could give you a fact and you would
misunderstand where that fits and just adding context that's accurate,
Like for once somebody gave me a very small what
(09:30):
we would call a reader. We're not gonna talk about it.
It's just a thirty second six sentences in the prompter,
read straight to prompter, just bang, bang, bang, and we
go on to the next thing. And the reader lead
with something like six people got shot in Chicago over
the weekend. Now we know, and this is on MSNBC,
(09:53):
we know what that means, what this suggests, right, and
this has been a right wing, purposeful, concerted effort to
turn Chicago into this thing where you don't even have
to add the rest of that. You already know the stuff.
You already know that Chicago is the symbol for the
failure of gun laws, black wildness, gangs, lack of fathers,
(10:16):
all those sort of things. But you know, like I
study a lot of these statistics, especially a lot of
these crime statistics. Um, you know, Chicago is not per capita,
Chicago is not top twenty most homicidal cities in America, right,
So so the notion of Chicago is very problematic. It's
the third biggest city in terms of the number of people,
(10:36):
so those numbers are gonna be higher, but per capita,
it's not top twenty um, you know. But also at
that time, I just happen to know that Chicago was
in a twenty year slide downward in its homicide rate.
And criminologists want you to compare a city to itself
over time. It's not there's too much noise to compare
(10:58):
Chicago's murder rate to flyin enter DC, or there's a
lot of noise within them. So these six murders over
the weekend in the summer, but the city continues to
be on trend for the lowest homicide rate in twenty years.
So I just added just that sentence. I'm like, I'm
(11:19):
not I'm not gonna say I refuse to do this read,
but I just want to add this so that we're
not throwing out dog whistles and moving on. And they
for a little argument. They allowed me to add that
little bit of context, and I felt very comfortable with
that with that conversation then. So sometimes it's just that
there's an interesting point one of the things that I
(11:41):
was going to talk to you about, and there's this
quagmire that all of us find ourselves in if you're
African American, person of color, a woman to to a
lesser degree, Um working at a white owned media outlet,
feeling that you can indeed bring the authentic black point
(12:02):
of view. We see it with Tiffany Cross, we saw
with Melissa you know you you see it. There is
this sense of well, they are giving me a paycheck,
and it is there's and whether we like to admit
it or not, they do have some sense of, Hey,
we decide at the end of the day, what goes
across these airwaves. Where do you think we are on
(12:23):
that and where do you think we are with the
idea of truly having black owned media that can compete
Because if I mean you know this, I say this
for the audience more than anything. If you look across
whatever we want to call media today, because that has changed.
But when we really talk about black owned there are
so few it's frightening. Um. It's an amazing question and
(12:47):
a gigantic question. Let me go backwards a little bit. Um.
I'm at a black media company now, the Grio. I'm
a host and a creative director there. We're doing a
show now called Masters of the Game where I interview
amazing people Debbie Allen, Tyler, Perry Keen, and Thompson um
Many others. Um. You know, you can see immediately a
(13:11):
shared set of references of values. When I say I
want to write something in defense of this person or
that person, there's I don't have to prove the point
of why are we talking about that person? I remember
once man, uh, Melissa Harris Perry had Nikki Giovanni on
(13:34):
her show on MSNBC and her team was situated just
like six ft away from our team, and I was like, wow,
and I heard that was great. Let's have son Sanchez
on the show. So I know Sonya Sanchez like her
(13:55):
and her son will answer and be like yo, okay, great,
let's get you know mom on the show. And the
people were like who's that who? Yeah, and and not
with a sense of oh the host is putting out
a name I need to respect and figure out who
that is. I don't know who it is. You have
(14:16):
to prove it to me. Now. I had uh, you know,
enough uh persuasiveness to get that to happen. And we
had Sonya on the show and she was fantastic. But
the point is that there that I had, you know,
at the Grio, you know, or you know, in another life,
if I was at the route like we would have to.
(14:37):
You know, I gotta sit down and saying it's great,
do it, love it, go for it. You know, I
want to write, you know, two thousand words about Octavia Butler,
like fantastic, Oh do it um? But yeah, when you're
at white institutions where you know, I was at b
ET did I don't think we overlapped it bet now
I don't think so. And then and I'm at the
(14:57):
Grio now. But besides that, in my career, I've been
at a lot of white institutions c n N, m
seb CE, Rolling Stones and others. You do get into
that conundrum you're talking about do I represent black people
or am I here representing myself? What does that mean?
(15:18):
Could I be critical of black people in this milieu
when others are not? Like would that be okay? Like
you know, you don't know. I remember, I remember I
talked to one let's say, I don't want to give
away his secret, but there was one brother who was like,
I don't want to communicate who it was, n't maintain
(15:40):
a secret. But he told me this incompetence. Because you
remember after Obama's first debate with Mitt Romney, where Romney
looked like he'd had catheine for the first time in
his life, and he and Obama was like extra muted
and ship like, guys, that idiot, he doesn't know anything,
like really, and you know, so much of the presidential
(16:05):
horse race conversation becomes very theatrical, and Romney was more
theatrical and Obama but I was like, Romney lied about
all his positions and he showed that he knows nothing
about it wasn't yeah, what was really going on in
the world, Like I'm not saying that Romney won that debate,
(16:26):
And the group think of the room in our pre
meeting was like, that's insane for you to say that,
and you will be seen as just supporting Obama because
he's black. So you you know, you're really risking your
credibility with the audience perhaps with us if you say that.
(16:49):
So now I'm kind of stuck of like, Okay, begrudgingly,
I'm going to say this because I don't feel comfortable.
And there was another brother who is bigger than me
at another network who said the same thing that he
absolutely saw Obama as having won that debate, and yet
he did not feel like he could go on and
(17:10):
buck conventional wisdom of the day and say the opposite
because people will be like, oh, you're just supporting him
because you're black. And yeah, there's times when I do
want to step out and be like, Okay, there is
a black person in the room, and I'm gonna stand up.
You know. I believe it was Rikia Boyd had been
(17:31):
shot after driving her car into a strange neighborhood in Michigan.
She knocked on somebody's door for help and the person
shot her and killed her. And you know, there were
people in our in our group who were like, do
we really need to report this story? And I was like, hell, yeah,
we do. And that was a bit of a professional
(17:53):
back and forth, but you know, I ended up getting
my way. But you know, so there I was like,
you know, I gotta stand up for you know, the
the brothers and sisters and what we want to hear.
But I don't want to be predictable as like a
cheerleader for black people, right. But I did feel always
very sensitive about being critical of Obama because other folks
(18:18):
on the network and and on Fox, we're criticizing him
completely unfairly and overaggressively. So I'm like well in the
context of that of the general thing you're getting from media.
In in total, I don't want to be like, well,
I'm gonna give a reasoned critique of Obama, Like like,
you know, so you you're constantly weighing my responsibility that
(18:43):
I feel, my affinity that I feel to the community,
and then what I feel within myself of what is
you know, what I think as a newsperson needs to do.
So yeah, you're constantly at a at a white organization,
you're constantly weighing those sort of things. At a black
organization like the Green you feel liberated. You feel like
(19:03):
the people around you, I can trust their judgment, right, Um,
you know I know that what there you know? You know,
once I was in um after h It's tiny things,
right after uh Freddie Gray was murdered by the police.
(19:24):
We were in Baltimore for a week and there was
a moment when we were walking up and down the street, UH,
just pulling people for for m os a man on
the street commentary, and there was this woman who was
just like a person of the street, who was She
didn't know who I was, but she was like, oh baby,
(19:44):
you're so cute. Oh my god, and because she established
his physical proximity, the producer was like, let's do an
interview with her. And I'm like, and she goes, ready,
let's go, and I did. I asked her one question
and then shoot her away. And I was like, can
(20:05):
you not see that she's clearly in the midst of
a heroin high And she was like, I didn't, I
couldn't see. I'm like, that's obvious, and like, I need
I know if you send that back to New York
somehow that will end up on the Yeah. You know,
so you you gravitated towards that person who was ridiculous
(20:27):
rather than somebody who seemed more appropriate. Your career has
been very interesting because you've been a little bit of everything, uh,
and you know, on the journalism side, you've you've been
a host, a writer podcast do essays. Was that something
(20:48):
that you always wanted to do in terms of the
breath of what you were doing? Um, I don't know.
Was it not conscious at all? No? I don't think
it was. I don't think it was just from a law,
from a from a design. I think that I established
myself within music journalism, but had wanted to talk about
(21:10):
politics and given that opportunity. Then I sort of, you know,
learned more and got able was able to do that. UM.
Went to graduate school at Columbia and Creative Writing and
learned how to write fiction. And then it was like, well,
now I feel like I'm good at this craft and
I can do anything. And you know, I can do
(21:31):
a TV show, I can do a radio show, I
can do a podcast. Um. You know I can do
a novel. I can do a nonfiction book. You know.
I mean, like you start to get like I think
I can do anything. You know, I've always felt confident
within this media realm. Whatever you got, I bet I
(21:54):
could do that. UM. I remember once being on CNN
when I was still a guest at CNN. UM, and
I've done a ton of segments by then, UM, And
I was on with this this this white woman who
had done a ton of segments, and she was a
fantastic guest as well and a friend. And she just
happened to be wearing a skirt so you could see
(22:14):
the knees. And I noticed we were chatting in between
the in the break and you know, it was one way,
and then I noticed when the red light went on,
I could see the goose bumps on her knees, you know,
and you wouldn't have known from listening to her talk
because she's professional. But I'm like, my heart rate is
(22:36):
not changing, my plant, my palms are not clammy, Like,
I'm really not having a nervousness. Like I know that
we're on air, so we're you know, like exited, but
I'm not nervous. I was never really nervous about all
of that. I remember one of the first times I
was on they had me in a split with Al Sharpton,
(23:01):
so it was like, you know, we're gonna kind of
debate this issue. It must have been Fox, UM, and
we're gonna have Al Sharpton and this kid Torrey, And
I'm like, and I remember thinking, Okay, you're playing one
on one basketball with Kobe. You better go because Al
Sharpon is gonna eat you up if you don't go.
And you know, I never would embarrass a brother. I
(23:24):
know him from way back. I did a profile on
him for Playboy magazine in the nineties, so he's been
a buddy of mine for a long time. Um, But
you know, like respectfully professionally, I'm like, I'm gonna bring
my knowledge and my funk to this issue, UM, and
just always felt comfortable whether it was with a pen
or a microphone or a camera, like I could do this.
(23:47):
And I think that's part of what makes some of
us who do this well work that we're that we
are confident that. So you communicate to the audience, I
am I do this right. You can roll with me, right,
you can come with me this. Being a guest and
a host are different, and just because you're a good
(24:07):
guest doesn't mean you'll be a good host. Um. Answering
the questions that are peppered at you is one skill,
and holding the whole thing together is a different skill.
And you have to believe the guest doesn't have to
believe anything except when they asked me my questions, I'm
gonna answer them. The host has to be relaxed, charismatic, warm,
(24:32):
you know, exciting and gripping bring enticing. So you know,
you have to hold the whole thing together, um, And
you have to believe that you belong there in the
chair in front of the camera because you know there's
several hundred thousand people through that camera and there's a
red light on it's live. You better go and you
(24:54):
gotta believe in yourself. All right, let's get too before
we let you go, um where you where you are today?
With two two great projects you mentioned. We'll start with
Masters of the Game for the Grie. I'll tell us
a little bit about that. Yeah, the Grio TV Byron
Allen them lets me do a show called Masters of
the Game where I do hour long one on ones
(25:16):
with amazing, interesting, inspiring black people, wise folks who know
a lot, and we're trying to get some of your
brilliance and some of your knowledge and some of your
craft out so that perhaps the listener can go, oh,
like I can apply that to my life, where I
can pass that and now get on to my son
(25:37):
or daughter or grandson or whatever it may be. Um.
We had Debbie Allen on the show, who's amazing, Keenan Thompson,
Tyler Perry Um is coming up, Um, Francis tfo um.
So you know, we had some extraordinary folks on the
show and just sort of like it's just an honor
(25:59):
to sit with some brilliant folks. Tyler Perry Um talked
about how media is his mother, but he didn't realize
it for a long time, which I found interesting that
he's doing a portrayal of his mom without fully realizing
(26:19):
it until others were able to point it out to him.
The other thing that blew my mind because he and
I talked a long time ago about basically me saying,
you go too fast? Can you slow down? Like your
your movies are at a certain level of quality because
you make them too fast? And you know, he was like,
(26:40):
you know, uh no, through you. But as part of
a whole uh, a whole approach to business that he
that he explained fully in this conversation where he talks
about if he went to the studio and said, hey,
need thirty million dollars or twenty million dollars, they'd say, okay, sure,
(27:01):
but we're gonna need to own that if we're gonna
give you this amount of money. But if he's like, well,
can I have two million dollars, they might say, okay,
you can have that, and you can have ownership, right
because we're talking about an entirely different level of stakes
for the studio. So he really really want is ownership
(27:23):
of the piece. So I will take the budgetary amount
that I can get as much as I can get
that allows me to keep ownership. That's gonna be a
relatively low amount, right, But the ownership is the important part.
Now that I have a two million dollar budget when
everybody else is making films with dollars, I gotta move
this quickly. I gotta you know, I gotta do certain things.
(27:45):
So but because I own it, I'm benefiting far more
than the wrong game, Yes, long game. And you know
the thing he said when I was pushing him from
an aesthetic point of view, He's saying, look, I get
people coming up to me every day. You saved my life.
(28:05):
I was overweight, I was in a bad marriage, I
didn't have the right relationship with God. I didn't have
a job, I was homeless, whatever, And I watched your
film and I found the information or the inspiration or
the motivation the direction that I needed, the nugget I
needed to help me out of that situation. And man,
(28:28):
I'm telling you, Quinn Tarantino is not getting that feedback, right,
Martin Scorsese is not getting that feedback. And as much
as you know a film esteete like me might come
up and say, oh, the way you're doing this is
not like you know, Spike is not getting that. He's
lie Yo, I'm changing lives over here. So I'm good
(28:51):
with your you know, uh, with your high falutint deconstruction
of my film after you finished why ching Wes Anderson,
I'm not interested, um, and like, hey, you know you
are serving. You are serving folks and they are being
His audience feels spiritually full from those movies, so he's
(29:15):
accomplishing something that most other filmmakers are not. Let's move
to your latest book. You were telling me about the
Ivy League counterfeiter. I grew up with this brother who
came from the South Side of Chicago. We went to
prep school together. He goes on to Columbia. Smart guy, charismatic,
(29:37):
tough streets football star, really smart, funny, unforgettable sort of dude.
Goes to Columbia. He's a hustler. He's doing his thing,
and you know, he finds a he's in money troubles
(29:57):
and he finds a high end copier on the Columbia
campus and his friend says, this copier is like the
best copier in the world, and my man says, really,
And he puts a dollar on the copier and it
comes back perfect, and he immediately sees the matrix and
(30:20):
It's like I knew exactly what to do. This is
a person whose older brother was a professional bank robber.
So he had game, like this is how you maneuver
in the streets. Like he was not just talking it,
like he was really like educated on, like this is
the street world, right, this is what you do and
don't do. So he really had the game already, and
(30:43):
now he had the product. He goes out the next day,
takes a cab from up in Harlem of Columbia, about
five blocks, five dollar ride. Here's the fake twenty cab.
He gives him fifteen dollars in real money, and he's like,
oh my god, this is real. Keeps taking cabs all
day long up and down Manhattan. Eight hundred dollars. This
(31:03):
is really real. He went back, He made ten thousand
dollars and starts distributing in in other ways and we're
off to the races, and for several months he's distributing
money every which way he possibly can. Now there's a
lot to this. Number one, this is not the way
(31:23):
that counterfeiting is done. I talked to actual counterfeiters. They
laugh hearing this method. We don't photo copy money, we
make plates and we are actually printing, like you've seen
people printing T shirts. That's how we do. But this
is what he's doing. But the other thing he talks
about is that, um, you know, spending money gets boring, right,
(31:47):
And I know most of us we have a bad
day or whatever, and retail therapy helps us out. But
if you kept doing that times a thousand, you would
soon be like this is and you you can't go
and buy high end stuff. You gotta buy you know, crap,
you know, because because you're just acquiring a ton of
stuff because I'm just trying to break these fake bills.
(32:09):
So you know, he compared it somebody compared to Brewster's millions.
Remember the Richard Pryor movie where he had to spend
I think it was a hundred million to be able
to get like a billion dollars or something like that.
And he quickly is like, the spending is for the
births is horrible, like just having to spend all the time. Um.
The other thing too, that we're trying to work through
was like mother was like Ivy League high school, Ivy
(32:33):
League college. He was smart, he knew the path, he
had some networking people respected him, and yet he actively
chooses the underworld, and when even when people are telling
him like yo, money, you need to stop that, He's like, no,
I want to be part of that. I want to
be in the hood. I want to be in the
(32:54):
mud with those guys. And we all know where that leads.
And yeah, he's choosing that. Um. It's an extraordinary story.
The way that he's brought down underlines a familial betrayal
(33:14):
that will be shocking to readers. Um. And you would
think that going to prison for a relatively small amount
of time would cure you of whatever it was that
made you want to go into them, into the mud,
into the underground. No, sir, no sir. We got out,
(33:36):
We got back on our feet, and then we went back.
Let's see what we can do. Man a smart guy
who makes bad decisions about his life. And it's a
fascinating story. Well, the new book is Ivy League Counterfeiter
and we can find you can get it on scribbed
(33:56):
dot com, s c R I b D dot com.
It's an e book and an audio book. You can
only get it there. It's not on Amazon, all right.
And Masters of the Game Grio t V. Hey Man
always a pleasure to talk to you. It's it's always
I love your perspective. Thank you, and uh I greatly
appreciate it. It's an honor to talk to you. You
(34:18):
are one of the people who helped show me how
to be a broadcaster, so just to just to be
able to talk to you is extraordinary. Thanks man, Thanks
again to Torrey. Is latest novel, The Ivy League Counterfeitter,
can be found at script dot com. That's s c
(34:38):
R I b D dot com, and his latest show,
Masters of the Game can be seen on the Grio
TV dent product m Victory Today a found at