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CV NEWS FEED // CBS News is facing internal backlash after criticizing journalist Tony Dokoupil for asking “tough questions” during an interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book that presents “one-sided polemic against Israel,” The Free Press reported.
Coleman Hughes of the Free Press stated in an October 2 review of Coates’s book that The Message is “a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” and that it is driven by an “obsession” to “smear Israel—an exercise that takes up fully half the book.”
According to an October 7 report from the Free Press, Coates had emphatically dismissed the idea that the conflict is complex, arguing that such framing serves as a tool that “journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation,” and likened the attempt to historical justifications for slavery and segregation.
In the September 30 interview, Dokoupil challenged Coates on his failure to address the context of Israel’s security concerns, including its neighbors’ hostile intentions and the impact of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Free Press report stated that The Message is a “simplistic telling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict [that] omits so much complicating history that it’s no different than a lie.”
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?” Dokoupil asked Coates, according to the Free Press. “Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada… the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”
Despite Dokoupil’s efforts to ensure a balanced conversation, CBS executives held an editorial meeting on October 7 — a year after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel — where they expressed dissatisfaction with the interview, saying that it did not meet CBS’s “editorial standards,” according to the report.
Adrienne Roark, who oversees newsgathering, spoke to the team at the editorial meeting, after being introduced by Wendy McMahon, head of CBS News. Roark emphasized the need for “empathy, respect, and a commitment to truth” in covering a story “like October 7.”
“We will still ask tough questions,” Roark assured attendees, the Free Press reported. “We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door.”
“There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing,” Roark said, according to the report. “Many of you have reached out to express concerns about recent reporting. Specifically about the CBS Mornings Coates interview last week,” Roark continued.
Apologizing that it took “this long to have this conversation,” Roark emphasized that the clarifying meeting was “about preserving the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News.”
CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford defended Dokoupil to the CBS management, arguing that journalists have an obligation to provide viewers with a fuller account of the truth, especially “when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has.”
“I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford echoed Roark’s statement, the Free Press reported.
She said, “Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network that was completely devoid of history or facts.”
Crawford expressed uncertainty to the CBS executives about how to move forward after the meeting, according to the report.
“As someone who does a lot of interviews,” she said, “I’m not sure now how to proceed in challenging viewpoints that are obviously one-sided and devoid of fact and history.”
According to the Free Press report, CBS management “chose not to answer [Crawford’s] question in front of the whole group on the call.”
The Free Press report added, “The other thing worth noticing is CBS’s double standard,” citing CBS anchor Gayle King’s emotional response to the killing of George Floyd, where she emphasized the dangers faced by Black men in America.
King’s “lived experience” is seen as an “asset” in discussions of racism and social justice, whereas in Dokoupil’s case, “his experience as the father of Jewish children who live in Israel, has no place in an interview with an author sharing his cartoonish indictment of the world’s only Jewish state,” according to the Free Press.
“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power. He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful,” the report said.
“It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus,” according to the Free Press report.
