COLUMBIA BROADCASTING STRUGGLE SESSION UPDATE: ‘Shut the F*ck Up:’ CBS Staffers Escalate Criticism of Tony Dokoupil’s Hostility on Palestine [sic – Ed]. The far left Zeteo Substack, created by Mehdi Hasan, formerly with MSNBC (and where John Harwood and even Greta Thunberg(!) have slots on the masthead), gives the game away with what happened to Tony Dokoupil after he committed journalism at CBS:
It was the sitdown with Coates, who was promoting his new book The Message, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Due to the fraught nature of the book, which features an essay on the “apartheid” Coates witnessed in the occupied West Bank, the network went through its standard protocol of vetting questions through its legal, standards, and race and culture departments. The properly vetted questions were then included on what’s known as a “one-sheet,” from which everyone within the show works.
As newsroom staffers pointed out to Zeteo, the “one-sheet is done for a reason,” which is to work within editorial standards. Hosts or reporters can push back and discuss what is on the sheet and whether it has been properly fact-checked, but one has to be working within that process to begin with.
While co-host Nate Burleson stuck to the plan with his first question, Dokoupil immediately deviated from the script. The anchor said that Coates’ book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” wondered if the author was “offended by the Jewish state,” and questioned why he didn’t include “appropriate” context about the Palestinians’ role in their own oppression. Dokoupil’s ex-wife and two children live in Israel, by the way, something he did not disclose in the interview.
“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?” Dokoupil pointedly asked. “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”
“There is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates calmly responded.
“What is it that particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state, that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?” Dokoupil wondered.
“There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state,” Coates replied. “I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”
Journalism ethics experts have criticized Dokoupil’s “gotcha” and “performative” questions that were designed to put Coates on the defensive.
Dokoupil’s hijacking of the interview left both Burleson and co-host Gayle King largely sidelined throughout the discussion. In fact, King had planned to ask Coates about Hamas’ role in the war with Israel, something that the author revealed in a podcast interview with Trevor Noah. According to Coates, King had approached him backstage with his book full of her handwritten notes, explaining that she was going to ask him some specific questions.
“While on the one hand, [Dokoupil] probably did me a service… by just kind of commandeering that interview, I don’t think he did Nate and Gayle a service, and I’m really, really sorry for them,” he told Noah.
In his conversation with Mehdi, Coates said that while he was a “little surprised” by Dokoupil, he soon realized he “was in a fight” but was prepared.
As Stephen Miller tweets, “Coates had every question asked of him vetted through what CBS calls a race and culture department. They are even calling it ‘standard protocol.’ This is what CBS News is now.”
More from Zeteo:
Even before Coates was all but accused of being an antisemitic terrorist by Dokoupil last week, the CBS anchor had raised eyebrows at the network over the past year with his overt editorializing, especially regarding topics involving Israel and Gaza.
“If Tony would just shut the fuck up, none of this would be happening,” one CBS insider told Zeteo.
For instance, following a report in April on the University of Southern California canceling its Muslim valedictorian’s speech over “safety concerns” due to her pro-Palestinian views, Dokoupil said it spoke to a “bigger debate about what’s acceptable public speech” and suggested the student had called “for the complete abolishment of Israel,” prompting internal complaints.
Yes, we can’t report on the air what those crazy MAGA-hat wearing nutters at, err, NPR reported in April:
Asna Tabassum was selected as this year’s valedictorian. But student groups called for the decision to be reconsidered due to Tabassum’s social media content on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Tabassum’s Instagram page links to a slideshow that says “learn about what’s happening in Palestine, and how to help,” and criticizes Zionism as “a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land.” The slideshow calls for a “one-state solution” that “would mean palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of israel.”
Best that their on-air journalist “just shut the f*** up,” instead. There are rules at CBS this sort of thing. According to the Free Press, these rules can require doublethink that would make the Inner Party of Oceania blush: Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?
In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.
Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”
He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.
In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
This latest revelation comes after CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil was admonished by executives at the network for his interview of best-selling author Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new anti-Israel book, The Message.
The other thing we’ve learned, Jeffrey Blehar writes at NRO in “The Obscene Public Humiliation Ritual of CBS’s Tony Dokoupil” is that, despite the premise of Nellie Bowles’ recent book, The Morning after the Revolution, wide swatches of the left are still very much stuck in the mindset of 2020:
The debate was not about Dokoupil, really; instead, it was about “whether Israel should exist at all” and why it wasn’t fair that Coates was prevented from making his case uninterrupted. (I can’t help but imagine a similar talk show in, say, Hamburg in 1943.)
Apparently, by the end of it all Dokoupil finally broke down and apologized (in tears) for potentially “endangering” any of his CBS colleagues and then submitted to an hourlong deprogramming session with CBS’s in-house “Race and Culture Unit” to instruct him in “context, tone, and intention,” so that he can be a more proper supplicant to the next elite political or cultural messiah who walks through the door. He may also have been shipped off to reeducation camp, though this is not yet documented in the reporting.
Commentary is almost superfluous, and beyond me at this particular point. For I am enraged at watching us reenact the public humiliation rituals that we witnessed in 2020, and imported from Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China long before that time. The same internal pressure and public lobbying we saw in the James Bennet affair at the New York Times years ago — and boy doesn’t this feel ironic given the role Bennet played in shaping Coates’s career — has now been brought to bear on anyone who dares cross such an elite messiah, particularly when he bears a message beloved by the younger generations staffing the media industry. We all know why this happened, because all of this has happened before. We thought it would not happen again, and we were wrong.
For years, the left seemed to be permanently stuck in the 1960s and ‘70s. Now the touchstone is 2020, and likely will be, for the foreseeable future.
