CBS Makes a Mockery of ‘Standards’

The network’s struggle session over an appropriately tough interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one in a series of embarrassing episodes.

C BS News is experiencing a crisis of standards, the crisis being that it doesn’t appear to have any.

Network staffers met with management last week for editorial meetings centered on a September 30 interview in which CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed comic-book author Ta-Nehisi Coates to defend his new book, The Message. In the book, Coates compares Israel to the Jim Crow–era American South, questions the founding of Israel following the Holocaust, claims Israel is a state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid,” and says of a ten-day trip he took in 2023 to Israel and the West Bank, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger [sic] and more intense than in Israel.” The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” appear not even one time in any of Coates’s winding essay, which would be a bit like writing about the Spanish Civil War without mentioning the terms “Soviet Union” or “communism.”

“When I read the book,” said Dokoupil, “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.”

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 café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”

The best Coates could muster was a weak, “I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

In other words, the interview proved an unmitigated disaster for the award-winning author (his earlier book, Between the World and Me, was the toast of the town back in 2015). Through simple inquiry and follow-up questions, Coates was revealed to be vapid, unprepared, slow-witted, and ill-informed regarding the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, to say nothing of the Jewish people’s millennia-long struggle not to be murdered by their neighbors. Yet, despite this poor showing, it is Dokoupil, and not Coates, who has faced reputational backlash. More than two dozen CBS employees have complained to management, accusing the anchor of an overt pro-Israel bias. These staffers are not alone in their displeasure. Many journalism advocacy groups, including the Asian American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, “signaled plans to write letters of protest,” according to Puck’s Dylan Byers.

At this point, it may be helpful to point out that Tony Dokoupil is Jewish, and Ta-Nehisi Coates is black.

Following internal grumbling regarding the interview, CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon brought in the Standards and Practices Unit and the — this is real — Race and Culture Unit 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,” while the latter determined his “tone” to be unacceptable.

Meanwhile, management arranged to invite a self-described “mental health expert DEI strategist and trauma trainer,” who, ironically enough, is an intensely racist person himself, to help staffers work through their hurt feelings regarding the Coates episode. After social-media users stumbled upon the online history of racist commentary by said trauma trainer, CBS decided not to include him in its staff deliberations.

As for the editorial meetings last week, the first of which was held on October 7, the one-year anniversary of the greatest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, CBS brass used them as opportunities to appease the malcontents. At the first meeting, executives reprimanded Dokoupil for falling below CBS News’ “editorial standards.” Management took exception specifically to Dokoupil’s characterization of The Message as extreme. (For what it’s worth, during an appearance last week on a podcast, Coates said of terrorists who carried out the October 7 massacre, “Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail . . . And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, ‘This is too far.’ I don’t know that I am.” Sounds a little extreme.) Network executives also accused Dokoupil 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 a second CBS editorial meeting, one staffer reportedly accused Dokoupil of being a “racist,” as well as “xenophobic” and “Islamophobic,” according to media reporter Justin Baragona.

Meanwhile, as this brouhaha unfolded, CBS faced an entirely different scandal, one in which 60 Minutes was caught airing separate versions of Vice President Kamala Harris’s meandering response to a question about Israel’s defensive war against the terror groups on its borders.

On October 6, CBS aired part of an interview in which Harris was asked by correspondent Bill Whitaker whether the United States can influence Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making. Here is the response CBS aired Sunday:

Harris: The aid that we have given Israel allowed Israel to defend itself against 200 ballistic missiles that were just meant to attack the Israelis and the people of Israel. And when we think about the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah presents, Iran, I think that it is without any question our imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself against those kinds of attacks. Now the work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a ceasefire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.

Whitaker: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.

Harris: Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.

The next day, however, the network clipped the Democratic nominee’s response, editing it down into something a bit more coherent and far less tortuous:

Whitaker: Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Harris: The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.

Whitaker: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.

Harris: We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.

CBS has not yet explained why it aired two separate versions of the same answer. It has not explained this direct violation of its standard guide, which, as Byers helpfully reminds us, says, “Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response.”

“You cannot create an answer merely because you wish the subject had said it better,” the guide adds.

While we’re on the topic of CBS doing one thing while preaching an entirely different message about accuracy and impartiality, it’s worth noting another item that emerged amid the 60 Minutes edits and the meltdown over the Dokoupil-Coates interview. The network apparently instructs its reporters not to refer to Jerusalem as being “in Israel.” Not only not the capital of Israel, even though Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but in Israel. This is on top of the fact that staffers were allegedly asked immediately following the October 7 slaughter to think twice about using the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas terrorists because one man’s terrorist may be another man’s folk hero.

As incomprehensible as CBS’s approach to these back-to-back issues may be, one should not be surprised. This is hardly the first time the network has played fast and loose with its own unique and, apparently, proprietary set of journalism standards.

Recall that Gayle King, a news anchor, ruffled no feathers on May 26, 2020, when she declared following the death of George Floyd, “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.”

This pronouncement cleared the network’s bar for “impartiality”? Or did management reason that King was exempted from the usual standards regarding personal commentary because she is black, and the news upon which she was commenting involved a black man? If so, does this courtesy not extend to Dokoupil, who, as a Jew, might have a valuable perspective on matters affecting the life and death of Jews, as King presumably did for blacks?

And what are we to make of King’s CBS Mornings interview of the Israeli father of a child taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, in which she said, “Now this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that? You know, you have innocent children and Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying. And no one seems to be able to say, ‘Enough, stop that.’” To this, Tom Hand replied, in a tone of anguished exasperation, that he didn’t care about politics, he just wanted his Emily back. CBS’s Standards and Practices and Race and Culture units had nothing to say about this interaction? No all-hands reprimand for King’s “tone”?

The Dokoupil saga will likely get dumber before it eventually blows over. But let’s not lose sight of the big question underlying it. CBS executives claim Dokoupil failed to meet their exacting standards of journalistic excellence. They say this even though his colleagues have grilled guests with objectively inappropriate lines of questions, with zero internal pushback. These executives say this even as 60 Minutes openly violates the network’s interview production and editing standards, with zero explanation or defense provided.

All of this goes back to the underlying question: What standards?