UPDATE: Here is a Free Press video discussing their scoop:
CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil interviewed well-known writer and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who just came out with a new collection of long essays, the longest of which excoriates Israel. I discussed Hughes’s review a few days ago and wrote this:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has the status of a god among activists, has a new book, which is a collection of three essays. But it’s making news because the longest essay—100 pages—is about the perfidies of Israel (he doesn’t mention terrorism or October 7). While the NYT gave the book a positive review, singling out the anti-Israel stuff for special praise, Coleman Hughes takes the book apart in the Free Press in a review called “The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates” (archived here). Remember, Hughes, like Coats, is black, but he’s a heterodox black along the lines of John McWhorter (though more passionate than McWhorter, I think).
It’s a new book, so I haven’t gotten it but have ordered it via interlibrary loan. The essay at hand (even according to the NYT) is resolutely anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. As Hughes wrote, the book “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.”
So Dokoupil interviewed Coates for CBS News, and apparently asked some hard questions about the Israel essay. You can see them in the video below. And CBS didn’t like that, so it n not only conducterd an internal review, but had a special editorial meeting devoted to obliquely defaming Dokoupil’s journalism. It’s already in Wikipedia under Dokoupil’s entry:
On September 30, 2024, Dokoupil discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with author Ta-Nehisi Coates during the latter’s appearance on CBS Mornings to promote the book The Message. Dokoupil implied that the book “reads like the work of an extremist” and questioned Coates about his view on Israel‘s right to exist. Following an internal review, a CBS News executive said in October 2024 that Dokoupil had failed to maintain the network’s editorial standards in the interview.
Here’s the interview, embedded in a discussion with three journalists:
Judge for yourself. Given the content of what Coates reportedly wrote, I don’t think Dokoupil’s questions are out of line; they are simply hard journalistic questions, of the kind that were supposed to be asked during the Presidential debates but largely weren’t. But the dung hit the fan after this interview.
And here’s the Free Press article about the kerfuffle: click headline to read or find it archived here.
The background according to the article:
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.
The article includes the recording of a “confidential” CBS editorial meeting in which the bosses apologized for Dokiupil’s interview (go to the site to hear the “confidential” meeting):
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.”
. . . 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.”
You can hear Roark hypocritically asserting the claim that CBS asks “tough questions” and “holds people accountable” and reports news without bias. Other bosses say that the meeting is not about Doloupil’s interview of Coates, but it’s clear that it really is. Why else would they mention this in a meeting? It’s grating to hear Roark and her colleagues reaffirm the unbiased and hard-nosed nature of CBS news at the same time that they dissed the interview.
But Doloupil had his defenders:
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.”
You can hear Crawford’s remarks on a recording in the article.
All in all, I think Dokoupil’s questions were absolutely fair, hewed to journalistic standards, and drew out Coates’s views, which bespeak a deeply misguided view of both Palestine and Israel. The Free Press argues that giving a special defense for Coates means that CBS has a double standard for journalism:
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.
I agree. Here we have the MSM showing that it’s been ideologically colonized by “progressives”—to the point that asking hard questions of a famous author who dmonizes Israel is deemed worthy of reproof. And I say this not just because the topic was Israel, for it would be equally reprehensible for the MSM to throw softballs at anybody who writes a polemic on a debatable topic that nevertheless goes along with “progrssive” ideology.
Well, listen for yourself and see if Dokoupil was unfair in his questions.
The basic problem here is that it was a white guy (“oppressor”) having the effrontery to ask hard questions of a “person of color” (“oppressed”) who was taking the side of the “oppressed” Palestinians in resisting the “white”, “oppressor” Jews.
Clearly this is simply not acceptable. The black guy should have been able to recount his “lived experience” without risk of counter-speech. The white guy should have just shut up and listened.
In the same way, the only way this interviewer got away with this questioning of Kamala Harris is because he is black.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186577/ta-nehisi-coates-media-antisemitism
The New Republic agrees that it was racist:
“It is hard to imagine another author, especially a white author, on any other topic, being summarily and unapologetically questioned and dismissed in this way on national television. The interview was biased (Dokoupil never disclosed his ex-wife and two children live in Israel) and racist (sorry, the presence of two other anchors who happen to be Black but said nothing does not change this interpretation).”
It’s funny – as I read this TNR article and noticed the tone of the language, I kept waiting for the author to use the R word. For a brief moment I thought, “maybe this author will focus only on the issues raised in the interview”. Then, bang, there it was. Dokoupil is a Racist oppressor, a sneaky and dishonest Jew, and his co-anchors are Uncle Toms.
The New Republic used to be good many years ago but I don’t care for it now.
First, I don’t get why people pay attention to Ta-Nehisi Coates. To prevent a rant, I’ll just write this: Ibram X. Kendi has more intellectual heft backing up his work than Coates does in his publications.
I’ve heard two previous interviews of Coates on his book and his take on Israel-Palestine. In response to Doukipil, Coates gave the best explanation/defense of his reasoning of the subject.
If McMahon and Roark were competent, they would be explaining to staff how well Doukipil asked hard, informed questions without being insulting…leading…or gratuitous. Instead, they have sold their professional souls by calling upon a DEI advocate to explain a journalistic issue.
The decline of CBS News continues…and know you know why.
“The other thing worth noticing is CBS’s double standard.” Rather than a double standard, this is a case of multiple personality disorder: CBS imagines that it is trans-NPR. No surprise, really, in this era of self-identification.
Clearly the interviewer did not recognize that Ta-Nehisi Coates was a Sainted and Most Holy figure who must not be contradicted, at the very least. Prostrate genuflections would be preferred.
Yes, this is personality cult of the type one expects to see in Russia.
I just watched Bari Weiss discuss this (https://www.youtube.com/live/wf5T7-9ATXI?si=N8RVskjkNcrBfhkm). Ugh. Sadly, news organizations have become advocacy organizations, and CBS is apparently no different. Rather than report events, they think their job is to influence events.
This may not seem related at first glance, but I just finished reading Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc. In it she describes the many ways that autocrats manipulate coverage of the news to further their aims. Yes, autocrats still assassinate people, but the modern autocrat now employs job actions, discredits opponents, and threatens reprisals on reporters and news organizations that don’t tow the party line. There seems to be a certain similarity of tactics in operation here.
Thanks for the video link and book suggestion.
After October 7th last year, I remember explaining to a neighbor why I was so upset about the massacres and why I thought attacking Hamas was warranted even if innocent Palestinians were killed or injured in the process. It came down to this: because of the attempted genocide of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, they became sacred victims to me when I was a young teenager reading the Diary of Anne Frank and Leon Uris’s Exodus. My neighbor asked, aren’t African Americans sacred? Had to stop and think. I realized that, for me, they were sacred before the civil rights laws of the sixties began to recalibrate the extremely unbalanced racial power structure in America. In my long career in government, being African American was a huge asset for employment and promotion so they lost the sacred victim status they had in my youth. But I suspect, for the CBS execs upset by the interview, they’ve retained that status and require special treatment. If those execs bothered to pull the lens back to look at their behavior unemotionally, they might identify it as the racist behavior they understandably want to eradicate. Humans are a hoot in a hat.
Moreover, while black Americans have been put through horrible things, I don’t think that there have ever been an idea, let alone attempt, to exterminate them. You don’t exterminate slaves, they are an asset.
I saw Jon Stewart’s interview with Coates and was slightly surprised (only slightly) that Stewart didn’t even gently challenge Coates in any meaningful way. I guess Stewart has to worry about not alienating his audience, but I did expect better from him. More fool me, I guess.
Stewart has been hopelessly woke to the point of brain death for a long time. It’s sad, because I used to love his take on the news.
I learned a new term and have spent some time reading up on ethnocracy. Coates at 4.20: “I am offended by the notion of states built on ethnocracy no matter where they are…. I would not want a state where any group of people lay down their citizenship rights based on ethnicity.”
He has just described the emerging ethnocracy that is New Zealand.
Nice that he doesn’t merely disagree with such a notion, but is personally offended by it. I assume this means that, since personal grievance is paramount these days, differing perspectives or countervailing arguments should simply be shut down or dismissed out of hand.
So he opposes the Arab League, too?
This article and most of the comments are just as one-sided as Coates himself. A truly objective article would have correctly called out Coates as being one-sided and supported Dokoupil for challenging him, but would also have called out US media in general as being almost always one-sided in favor of the other side and questioned why that one-sidedness goes unchallenged. The issue here is not so much that Coates is one-sided, but that his one side goes against the grain of 99% of US media one-sidedness, and that Dokoupil’s supporters are closing ranks around the 99%.
An objective journalist might ask: Why did Dokoupil challenge Coates when US journalists routinely never challenge one-sided pro-Israeli stories? Did executives lambaste Dokoupil because suddenly they are woke progressives, or because his willingness to challenge the one-sidedness in this instance highlights the routine failure of journalists to challenge pro-Israeli one-sidedness? Was the executive response born out of embarrassment at the double standard, or was it simply a fear that the graphics of a white man challenging a black man would harm the corporate image?
Objective journalism considers all of the facts and context. Balance is not about pushing aside uncomfortable truths in order to match a convenient established norm, it’s about finding the truth that lies somewhere in the middle. Yes it is right to challenge Coates for being one-sided, but it is equally wrong to simply dismiss Coates and his essay as an irrelevant, devoid-of-truth book that should be ignored. Removing the eyepatch from the left eye and then covering the right eye instead, still leaves a person 50% blind.
Yep, another rude first time commenter who didn’t read the Roolz. But ignoring that, you are simply wrong. The mainstream media are largely on the side of Palestine, and your ignorance can be seen in your comment that nobody challenges the OTHER SIDE, which I take to mean Israel. I presume you simply have ignored the many pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel articles that have populated, for example, the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, etc. etc. The real question is why nobody ever challenges Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is what the article is about (as well as why Coates himself is so ignorant).
I guess you did not read the Coleman Hughes critique, either.I have ordered the Coates book but you can simply listen to his accusations of Israeli apartheid to know the man knows very little of what he is talking about. And talk about one-sided? How did your hero manage to assess the perfidy of Israel and at the same time leave out any mention of terrorism or Hamas?