How Is CBS Marking October 7? By Admonishing Tony Dokoupil

The journalist did his job by asking tough questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates. That’s when the trouble began.

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.”

“We are here to report news without fear or favor,” Roark added. “There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing. And we’re at a tipping point. Many of you have reached out to express concerns about recent reporting. Specifically about the CBS Mornings Coates interview last week as well as comments made coming out of some of our correspondents’ reporting. 

“I want to acknowledge and apologize that it’s taken this long to have this conversation.

“This goes way beyond one interview, one comment, one story. This is about preserving the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News,” she said. “We want every show to be a place for courageous and robust conversations and discussions.” 

Roark of course was talking about Dokoupil’s interview with Coates and suggesting that somehow his interview impugned the network’s “legacy of neutrality and objectivity.” 

Not everyone was buying it. CBS reporter Jan Crawford, who has been the CBS chief legal correspondent since 2009, rushed to Dokoupil’s defense.

“It sounds like we are calling out one of our anchors in a somewhat public setting on this call for failing to meet editorial standards for, I’m not even sure what,” she said. “I thought our commitment was to truth. 

And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”

Crawford went on: “Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network that was completely devoid of history or facts. As someone who does a lot of interviews, I’m not sure now how to proceed in challenging viewpoints that are obviously one-sided and devoid of fact and history.”

An industry source said that Crawford has “balls of steel” and “is one of the most respected journalists at CBS.” He added: “It’s disgraceful that management chose not to answer her question in front of the whole group on the call.” 

But it should not take courage in an American newsroom to state what is obviously true. 

Keep in mind that this editorial meeting was held on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. The harshest thing that Dokoupil said in his interview with Coates was: “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.” 

That’s putting it mildly. As our own Coleman Hughes wrote in his review of Coates’s book, it “doesn’t even mention the word Hamas—or Fatah, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah, or Iran—once. In his telling, the threats don’t exist, only the barriers that Israel erects to contain them.” 

We suppose that has the advantage of eschewing complexity. But this simplistic telling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict omits so much complicating history that it’s no different than a lie. It would be like writing a book about the Civil War that blames the war on the Union without ever mentioning slavery.  

The other thing worth noticing is CBS’s double standard. Here was Gayle King on May 26, 2020, after the news broke that George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. “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,” she said, holding back tears. 

In the case of King—on the subjects of wokeism, racism, Black Lives Matter, and gun rights—her “lived experience” is an asset to the newsroom. As it should be. But for Dokoupil, 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. 

The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power. He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. 

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. 

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