By Christine Rosen
Sunday, November 03, 2024
A character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
explains pithily how he went bankrupt: “Two ways: gradually, and then
suddenly.” So, too, with the collapse of integrity at CBS News. The signs have
been accumulating for decades. There was Dan Rather’s 2004 use of false
documents to try to unseat George W. Bush during his reelection campaign. In
2012, 60 Minutes withheld the release of an interview with Barack Obama
about the true source of the Benghazi terrorist attack. And in November 2023,
Gayle King scolded the father of an Israeli child being held hostage by Hamas
for not worrying enough about the suffering of “innocent” Palestinians.
In October, the decline suddenly accelerated. King’s
colleague, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil asked some pointed
questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book, The Message, offers his
usual recipe of one-sided ahistorical declamations combined with a lot of moral
posturing about race and (after a 10-day tour of the Middle East) some thin but
entirely anti-Zionist gruel.
Dokoupil and Coates went back and forth for a few minutes
in a lively but largely civil exchange, with Dokoupil noting, correctly, that
the potted history Coates promotes would not be out of place in an “extremist’s
backpack.” Anyone who watched would have noted the brief look of surprise on
Coates’s face. He is clearly unaccustomed to anything other than fawning praise
from mainstream-media interviewers and seemed momentarily caught off guard when
asked to explain why he hadn’t bothered to mention in his book events such as
the first and second intifada or the existence of terrorist groups like Hamas.
Although the exchange was a little more intense than the
usual morning-show fare, there was nothing shocking about either man’s
behavior. Coates later talked about the interview on a podcast with Trevor
Noah, noting airily that Dokoupil’s co-host King had told him before the
interview what questions she planned to ask him (she did not end up asking them
on-air). And during an interview with one-time MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on
Hasan’s new vanity platform, Zeteo, Coates said, “I was a little surprised, and
then I realized what was going on, I was in a fight…. So it was right there,
you know, as a pop quiz, but I had studied.” Later, when asked what he thought
about U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, he said, with typical Coatesian
glibness that mysteriously gets passed off as moral seriousness, “It’s kind of
soul death for the struggle to just say, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go along
with this.’”
Not going along with this: CBS News employees, who
accused Dokoupil of being inappropriately aggressive with Coates and causing
“trauma” among the staff. Audio leaked to the Free Press as well as to Puck
media columnist Dylan Byers revealed that network executives Adrienne Roark and
Wendy McMahon openly expressed their unhappiness with Dokoupil; they claimed
his behavior during the interview failed to meet the network’s “editorial
standards.”
Even this reprimand did not satisfy their underlings.
During a second call the next day, as Puck reported, “some argued that
Dokoupil’s editorializing put foreign correspondents in danger, while others
complained that, by commandeering the interview, he had deprived his
Black co-hosts, King and Burleson, from asking their own questions.”
Others claimed that Dokoupil had been “racist,” “xenophobic,” and
“Islamophobic” in his questioning of Coates.
Dokoupil was remanded to the custody of HR—namely, CBS
News’s Race and Culture Unit—to be reminded (reeducated) about the important
principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That unit, as Byers reported in
Puck, “determined that while Dokoupil’s questions and intentions were
acceptable, his tone was not.”
The CBS meltdown is notable for a few reasons. First, we
learned that CBS News personnel (with the rare exception of legal correspondent
Jan Crawford, who defended Dokoupil’s tough questioning) are more conversant in
the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the popular
mental-health tropes of trauma and phobia, than they are in the common
standards of professional journalism.
Second, despite some small signs of sanity in recent
years, mainstream media clearly have not yet retreated from “peak woke”
madness. It was new but unsurprising information that CBS News employs a Race
and Culture Unit, distinct from the network’s traditional Standards and
Practices division, with a mission as Orwellian as its name. The unit, created
in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd four years ago, boasts
that it has a “four-pronged role at CBS News and stations as a reviewer, an incubator,
a producer and a library.”
Its “primary role” is the one it exercised in the
Dokoupil–Coates fracas, and that was to “review”—which sounds innocuous but is
in fact anything but. The unit functions “in concert with the CBS News
Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context,
tone and intention.” This includes working “with CBS News network shows, the
streaming network and stations by reviewing scripts and screeners as well as
providing input in the ideation stage of story ideas.”
The Race and Culture Unit is itself part of a broader
“Content for Change” program sponsored by CBS News’s corporate parent,
Paramount Global. That program is described as “a global companywide,
cross-brand initiative that seeks to use the power of the company’s content
creation ecosystem to break down the narratives that enable intolerance,
hurtful stereotypes, and systemic racism to exist and grow.”
If the Dokoupil incident is any guide, while CBS News is
intent on preventing “systemic racism” from gaining purchase, it has no problem
seeing journalistic standards wither. Amid the Dokoupil meltdown, Vice
President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes. A
short social-media clip of the interview featured an answer by Harris to a
question about Israel and Gaza. But when the full interview aired, a different
answer by Harris was used—prompting questions about whether CBS had edited her
remarks to make her response better. According to CBS’s own standards, “Answers
to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one
continuous response.”
And yet, that appears to be what CBS has done—and it’s
doubtful any of its staffers objected. The once-hallowed network is no longer
known for its reporting but for its falsehoods, staff tantrums, selective
editing, story suppression, tone-policing, and tape-splicing.
The chief of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, clearly is
not with her own company’s program. She told reporters that Dokoupil “did a
great job with that interview” and provided “a role model of what civil
discourse is,” adding, “I was very proud of the work that he did.”
She could make changes at CBS News that reflect her views
by disbanding the Race and Culture Unit and punishing the chiefs of the
division for their surrender to the Maoist DEI regime that was determined to
punish Dokoupil…but she just sold the place.
As for Coates, he told a podcast host that he might well
have participated in October 7 himself had he been a resident of Gaza. So who’s
to say he might not have murdered Jews and raped Jews and kidnapped Jews and
burned Jews alive by the thousands?
That would seem to warrant a follow-up question, no?
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