Fresh Air hosts Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley talk news, Detroit and psychedelics

Tonya Mosley credits her grandfather with inspiring her career in journalism. She is the new co-host of Fresh Air.

Erika Verik/Tonya Mosley

For as long as she can remember, Tonya Mosley, the new co-host of Fresh Air, always wanted to be a journalist. It’s a passion she traces back to her grandfather.

“[My grandfather] loved newspapers. He loved watching television. He had the radio on in his home all the time,” Mosley says. “And because of how he exposed me to news, I then became interested in it … and the rest is history.”

Mosley grew up in Detroit in the 1980s and ’90s, and attended the University of Missouri with the intention of becoming a print journalist. 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. 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.

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.

In meetings, coworkers sometimes dismissed stories about the Black community as not interesting or newsworthy. “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. “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.”