By Becket Adams
Sunday, October 13, 2024
CBS News is experiencing a crisis of standards, the
crisis being that it doesn’t appear to have any.
Network staffers met with management last week for
editorial meetings centered on a September 30 interview in which CBS
Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed comic-book author Ta-Nehisi Coates to
defend his new book, The Message. In the book, Coates compares Israel to
the Jim Crow–era American South, questions the founding of Israel following the
Holocaust, claims Israel is a state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid,” and
says of a ten-day trip he took in 2023 to Israel and the West Bank, “I don’t
think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger [sic]
and more intense than in Israel.” The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian
Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” appear not even one time in any of
Coates’s winding essay, which would be a bit like writing about the Spanish
Civil War without mentioning the terms “Soviet Union” or “communism.”
“When I read the book,” said Dokoupil, “I imagine if I
took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover
off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section
would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
He added, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by
countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with
terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first
and the second intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids
blown to bits?”
The best Coates could muster was a weak, “I wrote a
260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the
Israelis and the Palestinians.”
In other words, the interview proved an unmitigated
disaster for the award-winning author (his earlier book, Between the World
and Me, was the toast of the town back in 2015). Through simple inquiry and
follow-up questions, Coates was revealed to be vapid, unprepared, slow-witted,
and ill-informed regarding the long-running conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians, to say nothing of the Jewish people’s millennia-long struggle not
to be murdered by their neighbors. Yet, despite this poor showing, it is Dokoupil,
and not Coates, who has faced reputational backlash. More than two dozen CBS
employees have complained to management, accusing the anchor of an overt
pro-Israel bias. These staffers are not alone in their displeasure. Many
journalism advocacy groups, including the Asian American Journalists
Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the National Association
of Black Journalists, and the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association,
“signaled plans to write letters of protest,” according to Puck’s
Dylan Byers.
At this point, it may be helpful to point out that Tony
Dokoupil is Jewish, and Ta-Nehisi Coates is black.
Following internal grumbling regarding the interview, CBS
News CEO Wendy McMahon brought in the Standards and Practices Unit and the —
this is real — Race and Culture Unit to investigate the matter, according to
CNN. The former concluded that Dokoupil had not followed the “preproduction
process wherein questions are run through Race and Culture and Standards and
Practices,” while the latter determined his “tone” to be unacceptable.
Meanwhile, management arranged to invite a self-described
“mental health
expert DEI strategist and trauma trainer,” who, ironically enough, is an intensely racist person himself, to help staffers
work through their hurt feelings regarding the Coates episode. After
social-media users stumbled upon the online history of racist commentary by
said trauma trainer, CBS decided not to include him in its staff deliberations.
As for the editorial meetings last week, the first of
which was held on October 7, the one-year anniversary of the greatest
single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, CBS brass used them as
opportunities to appease the malcontents. At the first meeting, executives
reprimanded Dokoupil for falling below CBS News’ “editorial standards.”
Management took exception specifically to Dokoupil’s characterization of The
Message as extreme. (For what it’s worth, during an appearance last week on
a podcast, Coates said of terrorists who carried out the October 7 massacre,
“Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail . . . And
I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down. Am I
also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, ‘This is too
far.’ I don’t know that I am.” Sounds a little extreme.) Network
executives also accused Dokoupil of having an “ax to grind,” adding that he
failed to “set his personal feelings and beliefs aside,” according to a leaked
recording obtained by the Free Press. At a second CBS editorial meeting, one
staffer reportedly accused Dokoupil of being a “racist,” as well as
“xenophobic” and “Islamophobic,” according to media reporter Justin Baragona.
Meanwhile, as this brouhaha unfolded, CBS faced an
entirely different scandal, one in which 60 Minutes was caught
airing separate versions of Vice President Kamala Harris’s meandering response
to a question about Israel’s defensive war against the terror groups on its
borders.
On October 6, CBS aired part of an interview in which
Harris was asked by correspondent Bill Whitaker whether the United States can
influence Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making. Here is
the response CBS aired Sunday:
Harris: The aid that we
have given Israel allowed Israel to defend itself against 200 ballistic
missiles that were just meant to attack the Israelis and the people of Israel.
And when we think about the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah presents, Iran, I
think that it is without any question our imperative to do what we can to allow
Israel to defend itself against those kinds of attacks. Now the work that we do
diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around
making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the
need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the
hostages and create a ceasefire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of
putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.
Whitaker: But it seems
that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Harris: Well, Bill, the
work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by
Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including
our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.
The next day, however, the network clipped the Democratic
nominee’s response, editing it down into something a bit more coherent and far
less tortuous:
Whitaker: Does the U.S.
have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Harris: The work that
we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around
making clear our principles.
Whitaker: But it seems
that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Harris: We are not
going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear
about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
CBS has not yet explained why it aired two separate
versions of the same answer. It has not explained this direct violation of
its standard guide, which, as Byers
helpfully reminds us, says, “Answers to different questions may not be
combined to give the impression of one continuous response.”
“You cannot create an answer merely because you wish the
subject had said it better,” the guide adds.
While we’re on the topic of CBS doing one thing while
preaching an entirely different message about accuracy and impartiality, it’s
worth noting another item that emerged amid the 60 Minutes edits and the
meltdown over the Dokoupil-Coates interview. The network apparently instructs
its reporters not to refer to Jerusalem as being “in Israel.” Not only not the capital of Israel, even though
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but in Israel. This is on top of the
fact that staffers were allegedly asked immediately following the October 7
slaughter to think twice about using the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas
terrorists because one man’s terrorist may be another man’s folk hero.
As incomprehensible as CBS’s approach to these
back-to-back issues may be, one should not be surprised. This is hardly the
first time the network has played fast and loose with its own unique and,
apparently, proprietary set of journalism standards.
Recall that Gayle King, a news anchor, ruffled no
feathers on May 26, 2020, when she declared following the death of George
Floyd, “I am speechless. I am really, really speechless about what we’re seeing
on television this morning. It feels to me like open season . . . and that
sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for black men.”
This pronouncement cleared the network’s bar for
“impartiality”? Or did management reason that King was exempted from the usual
standards regarding personal commentary because she is black, and the news upon
which she was commenting involved a black man? If so, does this courtesy not
extend to Dokoupil, who, as a Jew, might have a valuable perspective on matters
affecting the life and death of Jews, as King presumably did for blacks?
And what are we to make of King’s CBS Mornings interview
of the Israeli father of a child taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, in which
she said, “Now this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that?
You know, you have innocent children and Palestinians who are dying, innocent
Israeli children who are dying. And no one seems to be able to say, ‘Enough,
stop that.’” To this, Tom Hand replied, in a tone of anguished exasperation,
that he didn’t care about politics, he just wanted his Emily back. CBS’s Standards
and Practices and Race and Culture units had nothing to say about this
interaction? No all-hands reprimand for King’s “tone”?
The Dokoupil saga will likely get dumber before it
eventually blows over. But let’s not lose sight of the big question
underlying it. CBS executives claim Dokoupil failed to meet their
exacting standards of journalistic excellence. They say this even though his
colleagues have grilled guests with objectively inappropriate lines of
questions, with zero internal pushback. These executives say this even as 60
Minutes openly violates the network’s interview production and editing
standards, with zero explanation or defense provided.
All of this goes back to the underlying question: What
standards?
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