 I'm motherfuckin' clockers on the clock. Yeah, clock's on the numbers. Gonna be a, you gotta dance with your shoes. Ooh, if your shoes is dirty, old chick name was Shirley. Her hair was kinda shuntin', kinda curly. Oh, smoothie. Reven on her leg. There's no chance that no real man's a man. Hold up, yo bitch rideskates, driveskates. That's what she do. She doesn't have a car. She doesn't have a towel. That's just how we livin' over here, man. I'm talkin' about real black. I'm talkin' about, like, at your mama house, that grease that sit on the stove all the time. That's how black we are. I'm talkin' about, I'm talkin' about, like, that Christmas when you know you ain't gettin' shit black. Right. I'm talkin' about gettin' a whoopin' at the barbershop black. You know how black we about to be cat? Bring me my change back black. This shit is for all the people who get to work before your partners and clock did me in, too. This was supposed to be the summer that Hunching came back out, cat. You know that, right? Now, this summer was supposed to be the summer Hunching was supposed to make his comeback. I don't know if you heard. We about to make some shit happen. Y'all all most ready? I can tell. How you livin', G? I'm good, bro. How about you? Man, welcome to the Trap Spot. I don't know if you heard. I don't know if you know. I don't know if you're privy to the information, but right now, the black market is up. We got somebody real dope and cool and hit with us, man. You know what I'm sayin'? Just to throw a few titles out. You know, this is a digital media content creator. You know, very well-established journalist, writer, documentary, filmmaker, cool-ass nigga who always on the scene. He always know what's goin' on. I see the nigga on Twitter talkin' shit all the time. He be like, I like hit like my most ghetto tweet, then some political shit. I be like, what this nigga got goin' on? Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Trap. My man, Torren Walker. Good, man. How you doing? I'm good, bro. I'm good. My turn. Good, man. Welcome to the Trap, once again, formally. How you been? I've been good, man. Out of the world, starting to open up, you know, and gettin' back out here and breathe a little bit more. What you been up to? Oh, man. Really just gettin' back into doing my journalism again. I had to do a lot of things remotely. Yeah. And that was gettin' on my nerves, and now I can go out and see people face-to-face so I'm doin' that again. That's good. Yeah, what type of journalism you been up to doin' this pandemic? Doing a lot of interviews. I managed to connect with some people who had been rockin' with the things I do, and so I set up, since I couldn't go out to do interviews anymore, I set up a Context Media website channel and a YouTube channel, so I just started doin' zooms and talkin' to people about some of the things that we were cared about. Bro, black journalists out here be catchin' hell. Well, yeah. I really saw, you know, a lot of press conferences where, you know, the old president, he just ignored the black-lady questions most of the time. Yeah, but you know what? You gotta expect that from somebody like that. Right. I think what people have to really pay attention to is be a warrior of people who pretend to be your friend and will invite you in, and still don't answer your question, but they'll smile at you. Damn, bro, I never even knew that black journalism was that hard. Maybe all the black journalists should just focus on investigative reports then. Nah, you know, you got black journalists in every different genre of journalism. It's just that the ones that tend to get more shine are the ones who do more sensationalism. Like, you know, celebrity media's always gonna sell. You're never gonna get tired of that. Shit, I did. Word? I'm tired of it. I don't give a shit. New people regular as hell if you look at it. Yeah, but you know, most people like that stuff because you know it's sensational, and it's just like watching reality TV. You know, people love that stuff, they eat it up. Yeah. But it's so prevalent that you can't really move anywhere else on that. That's real. I mean, I guess there's a lot of people who thrive off their celebrity gossip and shit. Whether it's real or fake, I guess it's just the illusion of somebody living a better life than you that makes them feed into that shit. Well, you know, it's an escape for some people. And you know, it's nothing wrong with going on and taking a look at what's going on with somebody for a while. You know, for a couple of minutes and then moving on or something else, but because there's so much of it, and they keep pumping that stuff out on a daily basis 24-7, you can't really, it doesn't rule from nothing else. I mean, they're real, but they don't want to do that. Yeah. Man, you got your work vision in a book about cyberbullying, you think that's real? I think it's real to the point where you gotta understand, there's a whole generation that grew up online and they don't know anything else. And there's a lot of people who don't really have any sort of outside stimulus, outside of being online all the time, literally. You go outside, you see people all day, you see kids and strollers like doing this. They don't know anything else. So if your world is in there and all of a sudden you say something that somebody doesn't like and then they create this mob that attacks you, then yeah, cyberbullying is real at that point. Now if you're 18 and up, yeah, I don't really believe in it that much. Right. You can always turn the, you can always cut your phone off. I think I've been bullied by every demographic of people out there on social media. I think I probably have individually upset, except the indigenous people. They let everything slide. You know what? If you have any kind of presence on social media, anything you say is gonna make somebody mad at some point. I know. So you can either end up being so wishy-washy that you don't stand on anything or you can just be who you are and just keep it moving. They'll find something else to be mad about in a day or so. That's crazy. People really think that you give a fuck about their opinions. Some people do. You know what I mean? Some people are so tied in to social media and they're so tied in to being in that cyber world that they really do believe in it. Some people don't, but they pretend that they do because it looks good. Just like some people pretend to care about certain causes that they really don't, you know? Yeah. I ain't one of them people. There's a lot of shit in this world that needs saving, but I think we gotta save the black people first. You know, that's a controversial opinion, depending on who you ask. Don't give a fuck. These people ain't gonna do nothing. We gotta save the black people, man. Black people are a fucking... I don't even know what the count is right now. I know it's a lot of us left, but leave us alone. We got enough shit to worry about. We gotta save us, man. Everybody else save themselves. They keep saying that that's the way to go, so we just go ahead to save ourselves. But you know what? You go to every other demographic. Everybody else knows that, except us. Yeah. We're not supposed to be everybody's life preserve and we're not supposed to come save everybody else, but when it's time for us to get something, we get nothing. Yeah, we need some shit, too. We need a lot. Yeah, just like, you know, like some basic silver human rights, you know? We still just need, we probably got about 30 or 40 more silver rights we gotta get. Then we can start, like, really enjoying some of this shit. They cheated us out a lot of them. Well, America's gonna always be America. That's not gonna change. I feel you, I feel you. But at some point, some shit gonna change. I hope we just owe it enough to see it. That's the cold shit, like, I don't know. You know, there's no way to determine that, you know? There's people, you know, 200 years ago on the field who thought they would never get any further than that, you know what I mean? They were fighting, they would run away, but they only was trying to run away for their own freedom and try to take care of their individual needs. They never thought that they'd see people who were black lawyers and black doctors, or, you know, black politicians, or black people who ran corporations, you know what I mean? We may not see them. I don't even think we got enough of them yet. Some of them people are so disappointed. Because they get on TV and you be like, oh, they those kind of black people. So it's kind of like they not even that. A lot of misrepresentation out there. Just, I don't think we should just have to accept people just because of, like, on our behalf, just because of that. If they don't have our interests, you know, on the forefront, then they just, they just as bad as the motherfuckers who's trying to replace. We got a real bad habit of doing that, though. We get caught up in the idea of representation. And because somebody's black and they look like us, that they're gonna take care of us, but... I think we just have been having a whole lot of the wrong kind of black people put in the positions that we wanted to see real black people in. Well, if you try to be a real black person, you're not gonna get that far. Unless you hide who you are until you get to a position where you can do what you wanna do. Exactly, man. But it's a certain level of realness that gotta be in anybody and in profession. You just can't go along and get along with everything. Yeah, you can. That's not healthy, though. That doesn't, that doesn't, that's not progress. If you just accept anything and let anything be, then what are you doing? Taking care of the Wallace. I mean, that's, you know, that's what I mean. People gotta get out of this idea that just because somebody looks like you're there for you, you know what I mean? Exactly. A lot of people say everything that, people say stuff that sounds good, and they say things that they think people wanna hear, but they're out for the bottom line. That's just a... That's it, and that's the corporation of how most of this shit works. Gotta look out for that bottom line. Journalism is some of the worst of that. Hmm. Like, what are some of the things that you have to, that you have to experience on that side of the journalism? They know that the public may not be privy to. All right. I started out in journalism working for mainstream news. I worked for Huffington Post. I worked for a couple other mainstream outlets. And right about... What was that experience like? Because sometimes Huffington Post did post some great shit, and then sometimes you'd be like, who the fuck let this come out? You was letting this shit come out. Hell no, it wasn't me. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes that shit would be so level, like, who the fuck okayed this? And then this incredible news place, too, is like, ah, shit, Huffington Post. Y'all met that one. I'll tell you about my story, my experience was, I started writing for Huffington Post right about the time when Mike Brown got killed in Ferguson. So the beat I was on was like, basically for lack of a better term, the race beat. It was like, cause you know, like every other week somebody was getting killed. You know, and there was a story and there was a protest and there was an uprising. So I was on a lot of those stories. While that was a hot story, nobody really bothered me that much. But then once you started seeing those court cases start coming to pass, I wanted to start trying to cover those. And that's when I started getting pushed back because it was like, it wasn't a hot story to talk about what was going on in the courts. It was a hot story to go out there with a camera and just shoot people, throwin' stuff at the police and quote, unquote, setting stuff on fire and doing all this and creating damage. They loved that. But nobody really wants to talk about what happens after that. You know, how cops get off after, you know, they basically can kill somebody in the street and walk out with their gun and get not guilty verdicts. They don't want to talk about that. So I had a lot of pushback with editors for that sort of thing. That and I had to deal with a lot of editors who weren't really from the culture who were trying to tell me how to talk about black people. Like what were some of their pointers? Whew. There was one time I wanted to go into the city. I'm not gonna say the city, but there was some brothers in the city who had been doin' a neighborhood watch. A lot of them were like fresh out of prison. A lot of them were ex-gang members. They didn't have any pedigrees. They weren't from college and all the stuff. They were just street cats. But they would make sure these kids got to school and keep out of like, from the dealers and the hustlers knew not to mess with them because these dudes were on the street. I wanted to interview them and they told me straight up what was the interesting story. Basically told me nobody wants to hear that. Really? What happened? Why are these guys now? We gotta get them on the show. That's interesting as hell, bro. Yeah, but it's like, damn, that's... But what is the goal of mainstream media and news from your experience knowing that they think that that type of shit is not important? What is important? Um, ratings. That's what they care about, ratings. However way they can get them. Even in news? Especially in news. News or what you want to call mainstream news or hard news is a loss leader for most corporations. You gotta understand like, most news that you get comes from maybe two, three, maybe four corporations right now in the United States. Four major corporations control 98% of the news that you get. So they're concerned about turning over money for their shareholders and they're concerned about getting ratings and whatever. They don't really care. I mean, there's a certain level of fact checking that has to go on, but they're more concerned about getting to a story first and getting it right. That's just the truth. If they can get paid from a story about somebody falling out in the street, they'll sell that. If they can get paid from somebody throwing a rock through a building, they'll sell that. Okay, so what is it really then? It's entertainment. Carlos Miller here and I get DMs all the time saying, Los, man, how can I make sure I leave my girl satisfied? 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So all the people who are watching the news who think they are getting legit information is just simply being entertained. Yeah, for the most part. There's exceptions, but for the most part, you're just looking at the same thing running over and over and over on the loop. And then when you get into black people and how people report on black people, that's a whole nother animal. Like how do they report on black people or like they're a... They report on black people like the circus. Basically, if something happens- Like the circus? Yeah. You ever notice like every time something happens on the block or there's a story that happens in a neighborhood that's not upper middle class, they find the wildest person they can find on the street and they put a camera in front of them and they let them talk? Yeah. You know what I mean? Not to say that that person doesn't have a valid point, but you know, they get somebody who's gonna act the fool so they can go viral and they just- I think they be trying to find those people because though, I don't know. That's a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing is embarrassing. The good thing is these people tell you exactly what the fuck happened. I was going to get some gas. And that man came out of the car. And that man was like, is that a car that came out of the car? Came out of the car then. He's out of the car then. Right in front of me. I'm in the car, I'm in the car, came out. Everything happened right now. I seen everything. Yep. Now that's embarrassing as fuck, but that man told you everything that happened in that bitch went in detail left out. I mean, sometimes that's funny. Like remember the guy who rescued the girls around that house a couple of years ago? Oh man, that's some of the bitch. That's one of the best shit that has ever happened. See, people love the dead giveaway. The golden part of that interview was when that man said, I used to eat ribs, man. Saucer Dan. Yeah. I used to eat ribs. Just as, man, where is that footage? Charles Rams over there with the slick bag of the Saucer Dancer. Big ass rib. Man, come on. He dropped a cigarette out of there one time I picked it up. Come on, man. Come on. They rescued the hell out of them. Now he still ain't get everything he was supposed to get for that. Yeah, and see that's the other part of it too. When you black people who move like that, get to know the writing, they're not able to capitalize on stuff like the way somebody who's white or whatever does that. Cause you see white people like in the food too and they walk in the record, they walk on the contracts, they walk into endorsement deals. I don't know what Charles Rams have got. I'm sorry to make you smoke cigarettes. Well, I don't know. I know he ain't really get the real, you know, the real like respect that he deserve. He's people's lives right here. I have a fun in the interview is like, he still did a great thing. And then like I said, like you said, it was he'll one day go on the next. Yeah. So that's why I moved out of mainstream media and started doing my own thing. Because I felt like, you know, after being on the grind and watching how people were able to tell stories, I'm like, you know what? The technology is here. I can do this myself. I don't really need anybody to help me with this. And I can say what I want to say. That's where technology is pushing everybody to go independent. Like have you found more success on your own terms as opposed to going in and having to try to figure out what these people in the mood for the day? Well, yeah, in a way. I mean, I found success whereas I have freedom to be able to say what I want to say. And I can fact check it myself and I can put it out and I don't have to go through a lot of filters. But it's hard to do that by yourself because you're not plugged into the apparatus with like, you know, I can toss CNN or I can call MSNBC and say, hey, put this out, put this out. So what kind of advice are you giving right now to the young up and coming black journalists? I don't normally give advice but what I would say is everybody has a story and everybody's story is valid. And you have a right to tell that story. And don't let anybody who's not in your culture doesn't know you dissuade you from telling that story. I mean, everybody has one. Everybody has a right to. You don't have to, you have 15 degrees to be able to tell somebody's story. If somebody trusts you and they sit down with you, that's all you really need. As long as you don't break that, you're good. What kind of literature would you point them to? Books that may help? One book that I'm a huge fan of and it's helped me out is Gordon Parks's autobiography. Gordon Parks, I'm fucking dope, man. Gordon Parks was doing stuff that it's wild because some of the ground he was breaking in the 40s, in the 1930s, being one of the few black photographers and journalists working in mainstream media. Yeah, his photography is so dope, just like even without the context of his writing, it's just, it got all these books and shit you could just see rare images. Yeah, and he was really instrumental in teaching me how about the power of an image. You can talk and you can write, but that's only gonna catch a certain amount of people. If you have video and you have technology buried together and you put these images together and you can show people what's really going on, that's extremely powerful and that says more than just what you can write. Well shit, man, let them know where they can find you at, where we can get some links to some of your print media and things of that nature. You can find me at the site, Context Media Group, that's the website. All my social media is Context Media and you can find me, Torren Walker, mostly on Twitter. I'm on that way more than I need to be, but that's what I'm gonna do. Man, you be on that, bro. You see everything. Yeah, I see a lot, I see a lot too, but you know, better for worse. That's where you can find my stuff. That's what's up, man. Anything you wanna leave me with before we wrap it up? You got a question? Yeah, after the last election and the way that it transpired through the media, where do you think the ethical code lies now for journalists? Journalists gotta stop, a lot of people not gonna like this, but journalists gotta stop being groupies and start being journalists again. There's too much cheerleading on both sides. If you're there to get a story, don't go there to get a story and press these people. A lot of these people, I know what you're talking about, a lot of these people ran on, I'm black, ski-wee and all this type of stuff. If you're gonna go and beat in these people's face, you need to hit them with hard questions that don't take selfies. Be a journalist. I'm probably not gonna get invited to the White House dinner now, but I mean it is. You are though. You are. You gotta quote him. All right. You gonna be in there, man. Don't worry about that, bro. White House dinner. You gonna be straight, man. Hey, the black market is open. My man, Torrin Walker, 85 South Shore. We out of here. Get your journalism game together. Groupies. Thank you, bro. There we are. My food is here.