CBS Needs a Safe Space for Tony Dokoupil’s Critics
Earlier this week, a Jewish cohost of CBS Mornings conducted a somewhat hostile interview with a prominent critic of Israel. There shouldn’t be anything particularly notable about this—it is the job of journalists to ask probing questions, and for skilled thinkers to address them. And yet the episode has produced a meltdown at CBS, with some staffers apparently demanding that the network take action to punish the interviewer.
They seem to have gotten their way, at least up to a point. The host, Tony Dokoupil, had to meet with the network’s standards and practices team, as well as its “race and culture unit,” according to The New York Times. During an internal staff conversation that was leaked to The Free Press and other news outlets, network executives asserted that Dokoupil had “failed to meet editorial standards.” CBS even planned to invite a “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer” to attend the staff conversation and offer guidance; these plans were scrapped after drawing widespread and well-deserved ridicule on social media. (More on that in a moment.)
The very idea that an opinionated host grilling an opinionated guest is somehow a lapse of journalistic integrity is ridiculous. It’s one thing to critique the premises of Dokoupil’s line of questioning or to contend that his presumptions were unfair to the pro-Palestine perspective. It’s quite another to demand protection from such questions vis-à-vis a kind of media safe space.
Note that the guest himself—the progressive journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates—has not expressed much outrage about the interview; on the contrary, he told Trevor Noah that he “wasn’t insulted.” In fact, Coates expected to come into conflict with a supporter of Israel during his promotional media tour. In truth, he probably welcomed it. Nothing sells books quite like controversy.
On Message
Coates is known for penning provocative essays on the topic of race, including “The Case for Reparations” and “Donald Trump Is the First White President.” His new book, The Message, is partly about his visit to the West Bank; he concludes that Israel is an intensely racist country and guilty of a moral crime against the Palestinians.
Those views faced vehement pushback on Monday’s episode of CBS Mornings, where Coates appeared to promote the book. Dokoupil—one of three cohosts, alongside Gayle King and Nate Burleson—took control of the interview, and asked Coates a series of aggressive questions about the book’s anti-Israel assumptions. A convert to Judaism, Dokoupil is the father of two children who live in Israel with their mother.
“The content of that section,” said Dokoupil, with reference to the part of the book concerning Israel, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
Later, Dokoupil asked Coates what “bothered him” about the existence of a Jewish state.
Coates took these questions in stride. He asserted that he was opp
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