CBS News employees are making fools of themselves, weeping and gnashing their teeth over an incident in which comic book author Ta-Nehisi Coates was made to look foolish.
But don’t laugh. This is our future, one in which panicked news executives defer to the loudest, most emotionally unstable voices in the room, cowed entirely by mob rule designed to protect certain viewpoints while suppressing dissident voices.
On Sept. 30, during CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Coates, the anchor pressed the author specifically to defend his new book, The Message, which alleges, among other things, that Israel is an illegitimate state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid.” The book also questions the legitimacy of the founding of Israel following the Holocaust.
Coates writes that his impression of Israel cemented in 2023 during a 10-day trip to the West Bank.
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” writes Coates, who compares Israel to the Jim Crow-era American South.
By the author’s own admission, the closest he came to experiencing Israel’s supposed Jim Crow-style policies was when he and his touring party were made to wait for 45 minutes at a security checkpoint. This experience, Coates writes, called to mind the experiences of black Americans persecuted by racist, sunglass-wearing Jim Crow-era Georgia sheriffs. This is the best example Coates provides his readers.
The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” are not mentioned anywhere in Coates’s essay.
At CBS, Dokoupil took Coates to task over his simplistic presentation of Israel’s long-running conflict with Palestinians.
“I imagine 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,” the anchor said.
He added: “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 the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”
Coates, who appears to have become too accustomed to intra-industry acclaim and admiration, responded pitifully, saying: "I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians."
At CBS’s offices, a full-blown revolt soon erupted, with frantic staffers demanding management punish Dokoupil for his impertinence.
Management obliged.
CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon called on the network’s Standards and Practices and Race and Culture units to investigate the matter, according to CNN. The former concluded that Dokoupil had not followed the “preproduction process wherein questions are run through Race and Culture and Standards and Practices.” Meanwhile, the latter unit concluded that his questions were acceptable, though his tone was not acceptable. As these reviews were being conducted and CBS staffers found themselves positively distraught over the matter, management invited a self-described “ mental health expert DEI strategist and trauma trainer ” to advise those whose feelings had been hurt by the Coates interview. The invitation was rescinded later, however, after social media users highlighted the “trauma trainers” racist online commentary.
At all-hands editorial meetings last week, the first of which was held on Monday, CBS management reprimanded Dokoupil, claiming he fell below CBS News’s "editorial standards.” They also accused the anchor of having an “ax to grind,” adding that he failed to “set his personal feelings and beliefs aside,” according to a leaked recording obtained by the Free Press . At one editorial meeting, a staffer reportedly accused Dokoupil directly of being a “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “Islamophobic,” according to media reporter Justin Baragona .
Amid all these meetings and investigations, it’s worth highlighting that Dokoupil did nothing wrong.
He conducted a tough but civil interview — that was it. In other words, he did his job as a journalist. And though it's tempting to dismiss this episode as a somewhat humorous farce, this isn’t quite a laughing matter. It’s another troubling data point in a larger trend of newsrooms caving to the demands of tantrum-prone, highly vindictive, and hyperpartisan staffers. The Coates interview meltdown is not a one-off incident.
The New York Times has likewise faced internal revolts over its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, including a staffer’s leaking internal discussion to pro-Gaza-sympathetic media outlets. At the Washington Post, staffers staged a successful rebellion to chase off would-be editor Robert Winnett of the Telegraph. The uprising involved angry staff meetings, employees complaining that he was too white and male for the position, and the Washington Post even publishing 1,000-plus-word articles characterizing Winnett as a snake of a newsman. He withdrew from the role soon after that. At CNN, there was a yearlong revolt during the brief tenure of Chris Licht, whom network personalities loathed over his overemphasis on maintaining a profitable business model business-minded and his general disinterest in ideologically conformity. Licht got the boot shortly after the Atlantic published an unflattering exposé chockablock with critical quotes and anecdotes from CNN staffers.
Speaking of the Atlantic, let’s not forget the time it hired and then promptly fired former National Review author Kevin Williamson after Atlantic staffers and readers pitched a fit over his pro-life views. Speaking of prompt hirings and firings, MSNBC did the same thing this year when it hired and then promptly canned former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel following a company-wide hissy fit.
There’s more, such as the mutiny at the New York Times over the infamous Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) opinion article, but you get the picture.
This is a future in which the promotion of left-wing ideology is increasingly the chief function of organizations such as CBS and the New York Times. Everything else, including reporting the news, is accidental to this cause. It does not matter, for example, that CBS made news when Dokoupil exposed Coates for the intellectual lightweight that he is. The important thing is that left-wing pieties were bruised, and we cannot have that!
The staffers who are angry about the Coates interview see ideological enforcement as the only worthwhile goal. They'll achieve that goal through any means necessary. For now, it's emotional blackmail and tantrums. But it may look much different in five to 10 years, something far worse.
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