TheGrio Editor Goldie Taylor To Mediaite: ‘My Own Personal Politics Are Quite Conservative’

“I don’t belong to anybody. I don’t work for anybody. I don’t work for CNN, I don’t work for MSNBC. I have the freedom to say out loud what I’m thinking, which is sometimes dangerous. I’m just a chick who lives in Atlanta.”

TheGrio.com editor and cable news rising star Goldie Taylor spoke with Mediaite recently about her many notable high-profile television appearances, her politics and her upcoming news and opinion website.

The no-nonsense, Atlanta-based broadcast journalist’s blunt honesty, and provocative insights have made her one of the most interesting voices on the political airwaves.

Taylor spent much of her life fighting to make it where she is today. She grew up in East St. Louis, later joining the Marines, and attended bootcamp at Parris Island, South Carolina. Following that experience, she attended Defense Information School in Indiana, where she was trained in public affairs and broadcast journalism.

“I was trained in the Marine Corps as a broadcast journalist, when I left, I got an internship at CBS 5 (now Fox 5), and a part-time job at the Atlanta Journal Constitution,” she says.

“Back when I was working for the newspaper, and came out of the military making $7.50 an hour and raising three kids, I also was on welfare, receiving food stamps and supplemental income, I went to Emory University, which was the only college at the time that had family housing, because without it, we would’ve been homeless.”

She left journalism in the early ’90s, to volunteer on various political campaigns, most notably, the US Senate campaign for Republican Guy Millner. Taylor herself ran for Georgia Secretary of State in 1996, though later dropped out due to medical issues. She attained success in the PR world becoming an “executive at two Fortune 500 companies”, and now manages her own advertising agency.

Taylor says that her mother taught her much about the importance of work ethic. “My road here has been as much about that than anything else,” Taylor says. “The other part of it is that I just wouldn’t shut my mouth! Even when it endangered my job or position sometimes, I just kept writing and saying what I wanted to say, until I landed here, which is probably why I’m not a contributor at a network on staff.”

She says one of the biggest tipping points that led her into cable news ubiquity came from a 2008 article she wrote for EbonyJet about Sarah Palin, entitled “A Woman’s Worth“, in reference to the Alicia Keys song.

“Sarah Palin appeared on my television set as the vice presidential nominee, I was furious because of all of the women on the planet, there were smart, conservative women who knew their stuff, I felt like this was one of those ‘we have to equal the playing field’ (things), so we have to pick a woman,” she says, in the context of Obama being the first black presidential nominee.

Taylor went home and wrote about Palin’s speech and sent it to her friends on email. One of her friends happened to write for EbonyJet magazine and she shared what Taylor had written.

“I was getting email from Singapore about it!” Taylor exclaims.

“I wrote a few more articles at that point, I started my own blog on WordPress, and around that time I joined Facebook and Twitter,” she adds.

Taylor jokes her kids were ticked off when she was joining Facebook but they eventually relented and friended her.

“During all of this time, I had been working in PR and advertising and I had been a senior manager, and then I had been an executive at a global public relations firm, along the way that set me up for a meeting that I had with CNN with the Black in America series, that took me back inside the media.”

“My own personal politics are quite conservative,” Taylor reveals. “I would pass most conservative litmus tests. When people call me liberal, I kind of chuckle and say, ‘yeah okay.’”

“I don’t belong to anybody,” Taylor explains. “I don’t work for anybody. I don’t work for CNN, I don’t work for MSNBC. I have the freedom to say out loud what I’m thinking, which is sometimes dangerous. I’m just a chick who lives in Atlanta.”

“I think the first show I was on was probably Tamron Hall, talking about President Obama and the black vote and what he needed to do to energize it.”

Taylor says a later news segment from The Rachel Maddow Show earlier this year featuring her talking about the controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate based on a story she wrote for TheGrio about her great-great-grandfather lifted her into the mainstream. The lede of her story summed up her feelings on the subject:

“Show me your papers!”
Major Blackard, then just 19 years old, dug into his trousers in search of his wallet. He patted his jacket, but could not find his billfold.
“Sir, I done left my wallet…” Blackard said. Before he could finish his sentence, the young man was posted against the brick wall, cuffed and taken to the St. Louis city jail. Unable to prove his identity, he would spend the next 21 days in a cramped, musty cell. That’s where his older brother Matt found him, beaten and bloodied. Matt returned with Major’s employer later that day, wallet and identification card in hand, to post bond.
The year was 1899. Major Blackard was my great, great grandfather.

“A lot of people saw it and that created access,” Taylor says. “So now I’m on regularly.”

Despite her success on the other cable news networks, Taylor has pledged never to appear on Fox News.

“I’m not particularly a fan of their business model. Say what you will about MSNBC or CNN, or how liberal they may be, they’re probably more liberal than I am, but I think they come to things honorably,” she says. “It’s not a place for voices like mine. I don’t necessarily know that diversity is important for Fox News’s audience. I don’t know if they care about race, they look for ideology. MSNBC puts a lot of value in diversity, ideology, religion and ethnicity, they absolutely have a left-leaning bend, but you’re going to find more voices. I don’t always line up, and I have an appreciation for that.”

As an Atlanta resident, Taylor has often appeared in news interviews to discuss the presidential campaign of Herman Cain, which, while she is critical, had some insight into his earlier success as a candidate and thought it was important for other black men and women to see that hard work “can and will pay off.”

“We knew one another, we never spent any time together, we’re very known quantities in the city, we’re the biggest small town on Earth, we all know one another here…I don’t think Herman Cain has to apologize to anybody for being black and conservative, he owes no one an explanation for that, but to say on the one hand, race doesn’t hold anybody back in a significant way, but then say I’m the victim of a high-tech lynching. Is the world post-racial? You can’t have it both ways.”

“I’m a bit on Herman’s side that I believe African Americans ought to be able to have more diverse voices and sometimes when people step out of the norm we tend to demonize and make it difficult for them. That’s not right, that’s groupthink,” Taylor explains. “Herman Cain didn’t get there by himself and I think African Americans could look at him and say they’re excited about his success, but don’t insult us on the way.”

Taylor thinks Cain’s newest scandal involving allegations of a 13-year affair will doom his campaign.

“There was never a time when Herman Cain was going to be the Republican nominee. Whether he accepts it or not, this latest allegation spells an end to his campaign,” Taylor says bluntly. “He can choose to keep going, but only at great cost to himself and his family. He has attempted to blame left wing liberals, but the real culprit is likely the GOP establishment who never saw him as a suitable leader for the party. Race has very little to do with that. Herman Cain has been tragically and incomprehensibly unprepared on the issues that matter most to our country.”

Taylor is planning on launching a brand new news and opinion site, named Big Republic in January.

“The idea behind it is there’s so much distortion out there, left/right that we have to tell the folks what’s happening — we’re moving on the premise, we’re one world, one people and every voice should be welcome in the tent, so I’m looking for contributors who want to move the conversation forward. It’s a no-party kind of site, it’s independent.”

She says her new site will be most similar to The Daily Beast, and will give other perspectives other than many of the Manhattan-centric ones. “I’m looking for authentic voices, there will be features, original reporting and columns, this will be a general market site,” she says.

Taylor says the site is “full circle for me, when I originally left politics, I was vice-president of technology at one of the largest PR firms and this is bringing it all together for me. It’s technology, it’s politics and it’s journalism under one tent, I don’t have to leave anything behind.”

When asked about what she would tell young up-and-coming journalists who are interested in getting involved with cable news, Taylor says, “I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint of heart.”

Goldie Taylor can be seen frequently on Martin Bashir and Don Lemon‘s programs. Follow her on Twitter at @goldietaylor.

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