CBS News Review Finds Tense Ta-Nehisi Coates Interview Did Not Meet Editorial Standards

CBS News leadership said an internal review found that a controversial interview conducted by morning show host Tony Dokoupil with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates did not meet its editorial standards.

During a Sept. 30 interview on CBS Mornings , Dokoupil interrogated Coates about his new book The Message , which includes an essay on his experience traveling to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to the Jim Crow South.

“I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space,” he wrote in the book. “For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”

At the outset of the interview , Dokoupil called the essay “extremist” and asked Coates, “What is it that so 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?”

A network insider told Mediaite that the interview prompted several CBS News journalists to voice their concerns internally that Dokoupil showed inappropriate bias.

On a call with staffers Monday morning, CBS News chief Wendy McMahon and her top deputy Adrienne Roark said the interview was reviewed by the network’s standards and practices department and was found to have not met its editorial standards, a source told Mediaite. Executives emphasized that the “tone” of the interview was inappropriate.

Not everyone at CBS agreed. During the meeting, legal correspondent Jan Crawford pushed back. “I don’t even understand how Tony’s interview failed to meet our editorial standards,” she said, according to Puck’s Dylan Byers . She argued that Dokoupil appropriately “challenged Coates’ one-sided worldview.”

Coates defended his essay in the tense interview with Dokoupil. He said he has no problem with a Jewish state, but does oppose apartheid and “the idea of states built on ethnocracy” as a matter of principle.

At another point, Dokoupil asked Coates: “Why do the Palestinians have a right to exist?”

When Coates defended his book as focusing on what he witnessed during his visit to Israel and Palestine, which he described as apartheid, Dokoupil shot back: “Why is that? Why is there no agency in this book for the Palestinians? They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture, as though they don’t have a stake in this as well.”

“Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong,” Coates responded. “It’s really, really simple.”

Dokoupil came under fire , primarily from left-leaning journalists, for his aggressive questioning of Coates, notably for the suggestion that his conclusions were somehow anti-Semitic or entailed an argument that Israel should cease to exist.

Watch the interview above, via CBS News.