THE COLUMBIA BROADCASTING STRUGGLE SESSION: How Is CBS Marking October 7? By Admonishing Tony Dokoupil.
Last week, CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil conducted an interview with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates whose new book, The Message, includes a one-sided polemic against Israel. Coates himself describes his book as an effort to debunk the complexities journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation. He complained in an interview with New York magazine that the argument that the conflict was “complicated” was “horseshit,” that was how defenders of slavery and segregation described these plagues a century ago. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
So Dokoupil asked him about it.
“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 second intifada. . . the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”
In other words, Tony Dokoupil did his job.
That’s when his troubles began.
One might think that respectfully challenging a source that presents misinformation or a picture so limited that it obscures the truth is what journalism’s all about. That’s exactly what CBS does in the aftermath of school shootings or when covering bans on critical race theory in local school districts.
But on this subject—or perhaps it’s this particular author—honesty and integrity are now an unforgivable act of editorial malpractice. At least that is what CBS News is telling its own staff when it comes to Dokoupil’s interview of Coates on September 30.
During its editorial meeting on Monday at 9 a.m.—the morning of October 7—the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s “editorial standards.” After being introduced by Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, Adrienne Roark, who is in charge of news gathering at the network, began her remarks by saying covering a story like October 7 “requires empathy, respect, and a commitment to truth.”
After quoting extensively from the CBS News handbook, she said, “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door.”
Does Roark know she works for CBS News, which hasn’t been objective for at least sixty years?
But like the New York Times’ young staffers melting down after the paper ran Tom Cotton’s op-ed on using federal troops to dispatch looters and rioters in 2020, the struggle session is just getting started:
This must be some of that objectivity that Adrienne Roark referred to above:
More objectivity from Grant here:
Exit quote:
Last month, I gave Tucker Carlson plenty of grief for staging a roadshow version of Springtime for Hitler with two months to go ‘til the election. With one month to go, witnessing CBS News holding struggle sessions and losing control of its staffers is an equally bad look. But then, bad things always seem to happen at CBS a month or two before a presidential election for some strange reason.
UPDATE (7:30 PM): CBS Anchor Ticks Off Network Brass by Committing Act of Journalism, Now Must Pay the Price.
So, the trauma session at CBS News will go just as you expect it will. Radical leftist nonsense words and shaming will be abundant, but common sense and reality will be in short supply.
It remains to be seen if Tony Dokoupil will have to issue a groveling apology for doing his job in order to keep his job, but we’ll keep an eye out for that.
As Kevin Williamson warned in 2018: Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is:
The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.
What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.
In other words, the goal of the struggle session is for Dokoupil to issue that groveling apology and be fitted with his Maoist dunce cap while simultaneously on his way out of the building.
UPDATE (9:20 PM): Question asked:
