“The Sin of Doing Real Journalism”

A CBS Anchor Is Punished for Doing his Job

A whistleblower leaked to

The Free Press

an audio tape of a CBS news editorial meeting on Monday, October 7, in which senior executive Adrienne Roark admonished the CBS Mornings cohost, Tony Dokoupil, for his interview the previous week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his just published book, The Message.

This episode should send shivers down the spine of every serious journalist. As

Bari Weiss

called it in comments on The Free Press Live, “The actual complaint is that Tony Dokoupil committed the sin of doing real journalism on morning TV.”

The background is simple enough.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a greatly celebrated author. He spent a decade at The Atlantic, where he wrote extensively about African Americans and white supremacy. A MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellow, Coates has won more than dozen of journalism’s top prizes, including National Magazine and George Polk awards, and a National Book Award for his second book, the 2015 Between the World and Me. It was a NY Times bestseller for two years. Over the past few years, Coates had focused on Hollywood, writing the sixth volume of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series, landed an Oprah Winfrey-HBO series about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement, and was hired to write the next Superman script for Warner Brothers/DC Films.

Coleman Hughes, an American writer and former Manhattan Institute Fellow, wrote in a Free Press review of The Message that “Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those journalists treated by the left-of-center establishment more like a prophet than a writer. . . .And when Coates publishes a book, it’s an event.”

Little wonder that Penguin Random House has set a massive media rollout for Coates’s The Message. It is four interweaving essays about Coates’s observations and conclusions from his visits to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. New York magazine in a profile last month said The Message “lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West.” Coates told the magazine that, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel.” It was “horseshit” he told the magazine that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors was “complicated.” For Coates, the situation in the Middle East is analogous to slavery and segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

In fact, Coates new book has been described by critics as “a one-sided polemic against Israel,” “flawed and ill-informed,” and “the crudest version of identity politics in which everything [is]… reduced to a childlike story in which the ‘victims’ can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the ‘villains’ can do no right (and are all-powerful).”

The Message omits in its 260-pages that Israel is surrounded by countries that have launched four wars to annihilate it. He does not discuss that Israel must contend with Iran-backed terror groups dedicated to wiping out the Jewish state.

As Coleman Hughes notes in his eviscerating review of The Message, Coates “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.”

“That’s like writing a book about the Civil War without mentioning slavery,” notes Free Press founder, Bari Weiss. “I mean, there's so much missing information, it's more like a lie.”

This was the backdrop to a September 29 interview on CBS Mornings. Tony Dokoupil, a veteran news reporter who is one of the show’s anchors, did exactly what any decent journalist would do: politely but firmly push back against Coates’s one-sided narrative.

“Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much,” asked Dekoupil.

“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? And is it because you just don't believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

At another point in the seven-minute interview, Dokoupil said, “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.”

Coates later told Democracy Now, “I don't really have a problem with a tough interview. You know, I knew what I wrote. You know, I knew I'd be confronted. I know. Was he rude? Was he aggressive? You know, I like, I can't really get into that. Like, it's not really something that I think too much about. The question I would ask, though, is, how often on CBS, on NBC, on ABC or any major news organization, do you see someone who is a defender of the Israeli state project get confronted in that kind of way?”

Social media blew up. Self-appointed woke influencers complained that Dokoupil was “too tough” and “biased.” Racism was the only narrative by which some could see a white interviewer grilling an African American writer about Israel and Palestine. Others complained that Dokoupil was biased since he has two children from his first marriage living in Israel.

No one seemed to take notice that what Dokoupil did with his questioning is what is supposed to happen during any decent news interview. When I have published some of my books with controversial findings — Oswald alone killed JFK or that some Saudi royals had advance notice of 9/11 or that the Vatican profited from the Nazi death camps during World War II — interviewers often vigorously pressed me to see how I defended my findings. I never objected. It is what good reporters are obligated to do.

This would have been a nothing-story if the complainers remained confined to social media. But the much more problematic response was that inside CBS News the madness played out. Some CBS news staffers claimed they were “traumatized” and complained to senior news executives continuously for a week.

On October 7, by chance the anniversary of the Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, CBS held an editorial meeting in which the news division’s senior executives disavowed the interview and Dokoupil was eviscerated in front of his colleagues.

It was an audio of that internal CBS meeting that a whistleblower sent later that morning to The Free Press.

“I want to be clear,” said Adrienne Roark, in charge of all the network’s news gathering, “we will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. That's part of our job, too, but we will do so objective, and that means very plainly, we have to check our bias and opinions at the door, and that applies to every single point. After a review of our coverage, including the interview, it's clear there are times we have not met our editorial standards.”

Roark went on: “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.”

Only one journalist at the editorial meeting refused to swallow the woke Kool-Aid. Jan Crawford, the network’s veteran chief legal correspondent, pushed back. “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. 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.

“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 facts and history.”

The audio of the editorial meeting makes it clear that Crawford was alone in her defense of Dokoupil. The consensus from the CBS News brass was that Dokoupil’s interview had crossed some ambiguous editorial standard.

Once The Free Press broke the story about CBS scolding one of its anchors for the respectful but probing questioning of Coates, it went viral in the mainstream news. Was the Dokoupil interview too tough?” asked the Associated Press. The Washington Post judged the interview “unusually tense and substantive.”

“I don’t think you understand the shockwave that interview created,” said talk show host, Trevor Noah, “not because of what you said but because of the way people felt like you were treated.”

What happened next is what is to be expected. The next day, at “an emotional meeting” led by CBS Mornings executive producer, Shawna Thomas, Tony Dokoupil expressed his “regret” at having upset his colleagues. Some at the meeting were in tears, they were so distressed at what they considered his harsh questioning of Coates.

The pushback from CBS staffers was so great that the network hired Dr. Donald Grant, a self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer” to counsel those who felt traumatized by what had happened. After word of that leaked, CBS cancelled Grant’s appearance at the Tuesday meeting but has not said when he will mediate the tension inside the network’s news division.

“How does a DEI consultant actually add to this particular conversation?,” John Ziegler, a conservative commentator, asked the News Nation’s Dan Abrams. “Well, I actually think that the DEI aspect of this may tell the real story of what's going on here, because we live in a media world now where DEI is everything, even when it shouldn't matter to the actual subject. You showed a clip, there were four people on that set. One was a straight white male, the other three happened to be people of color. If Gayle King had asked the exact same questions that Tony did, we would not be having this conversation. This would not be a controversy, because Gayle King is a black female and also happens to be friends with Oprah. She has all sorts of PC protection. No one's going to go after her on DEI grounds. And so, I think Tony's race is an important element of this.”

Bari Weiss thinks it is less about race and more about the subject matter.

“And the thing is, at CBS,” said Weiss yesterday, “when they have, I don't know, a Republican, on when they have someone who you know is a vociferous advocate for the Second Amendment, on when they have any number of people on you would expect CBS to do its job. Would challenge that person, yes. So why in this case was it unacceptable? . . . . the reason that this is a sin in this case, is because of the subject, which is Israel.”

“Can you imagine, on the first anniversary of 9/11 if something like this had occurred,” asks Ziegler, “where there was an author who was pro-Taliban and was gently chided on national television, and somehow the anchor, the person who asked them legitimate questions got basically destroyed in front of their own coworkers in a ridiculous meeting. That would be unfathomable, but that's how much journalism has degraded over the last 20 years or so.”

Whether it is DEI or the subject of Israel that has caused CBS News to admonish one of its anchors for doing his job, there is no doubt about the message it sends to young journalists at CBS and other mainstream news outlets:

“Think about a 26-year-old that works there that wants to become one of the anchors, says Weiss. “What message does it send to them? What kind of chilling atmosphere does it create?”

CBS is punishing Dokoupil for the unwritten crime of journalism that violates the sanctioned coverage permitted by the network’s woke overlords. It is simply the latest in a long line of infuriating and depressing examples of how the mainstream press has become hostage to political correctness and in the process, has gutted its ability to fairly and fully report the news.