The Obscene Public Humiliation Ritual of CBS’s Tony Dokoupil

The mainstream media has been afire over the past week about a major internal controversy at CBS, where CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil has been called on the carpet, publicly upbraided by his own network, and forced to apologize to his colleagues, all for the crime of asking literary activist Ta-Nehisi Coates a series of challenging questions. And for nearly two days, I have been utterly paralyzed in trying to write about it, because in every escalating turn and twist of the tale, it has become an almost emblematic media story — from a different age, the era of public cancellations, Robin DiAngelo–antiracist seminars, and the post–George Floyd insanity of 2020. Except it is 2024, and all the same tools in the toolbox are being used on behalf of a man making a full-throated plea for the abolition of Israel. There are too many different angles to discuss thoroughly here, so instead I am going to do something rare: I am going to write a disgusted bleat.

In fact, I already covered many of those angles half a month ago. For those unfamiliar with who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, or the public controversy surrounding his new book The Message — in which Coates, after a ten-day visit to Israel as part of a “Palestine Festival of Literature” junket, concluded pre–October 7 that the Jewish state was illegitimate, identical to the Jim Crow South yet worse, and must be abolished — I invite you to read my piece about him from late September.

To summarize: Coates is an overpromoted naïf with profoundly radical priors and a proud ignorance of history — this is in fact part of his purported appeal, the supposedly untutored “freshness” with which he approaches things — a black autodidact whose ability to write passable prose got him advanced to the forefront of American racial, political, and literary discourse during the ferment of the later Obama era. After accumulating a mountain of elite hosannahs — to the point of literary deification — he ducked out of the public conversation, but has now re-emerged to use that moral capital to plead for the elimination of Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacres.

I’ll leave an analysis on the merits to others. What matters here is that when Coates appeared on CBS Mornings on September 30 to discuss The Message with co-hosts Nate Burleson, Gayle King, and Tony Dokoupil, he was expecting a laudatory tongue-bath and instead received serious questioning from Dokoupil about the one-sided nature of his reporting and the wild factual errors in his book. Dokoupil interrogated him crisply and unemotionally about the content of his book — its one-sidedness, its blatant factual errors, the fact that Coates explicitly disclaimed any background knowledge or historical research into the subject before he began writing — and Coates had no particularly convincing answers. He reverted back to a defense of the purity of his moral beliefs, which was the best he could do.

I thought it was a good interview. I noticed many others — across the political spectrum — saying as much at the time, in fact. (A friend: “Gee, sure wish Tucker Carlson had taken this tone with Darryl Cooper.”) I’ve found that when I think this, however, it’s usually a solid indicator that a journalist has committed unforgivable professional sins. And in fact, the very next week CBS News gathered together its entire Mornings team for a conference call and formally rebuked Dokoupil for “not meeting editorial standards” — yet could offer no named offense. Essentially, he was formally and professionally condemned by his own company for asking pointed questions of a person pre-designated as a saint: the crime of lèse-majesté. (Of note: CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford alone spoke up fiercely on Dokoupil’s behalf during the conference call — almost in disbelief — which reflects her mettle as a journalist.)

The grotesque absurdity doesn’t end here, of course. CBS News then announced it was going to hold an “all-hands” meeting for the Mornings staff, replete with a “DEI strategist and trauma trainer” on hand to help people cope with the agony of watching their god bleed live on television. That appearance was later canceled when the man’s Instagram revealed the predictable panoply of hatefully racist, ultraprogressive posts — his “Uncle Tim” Scott photoshop in particular was a gobstopper impossible to choke down — but, according to the Free Press, there was probably some need for trauma counselors on hand, because apparently tears were shed. The debate was not about Dokoupil, really; instead, it was about “whether Israel should exist at all” and why it wasn’t fair that Coates was prevented from making his case uninterrupted. (I can’t help but imagine a similar talk show in, say, Hamburg in 1943.)

Apparently, by the end of it all Dokoupil finally broke down and apologized (in tears) for potentially “endangering” any of his CBS colleagues and then submitted to an hourlong deprogramming session with CBS’s in-house “Race and Culture Unit” to instruct him in “context, tone, and intention,” so that he can be a more proper supplicant to the next elite political or cultural messiah who walks through the door. He may also have been shipped off to reeducation camp, though this is not yet documented in the reporting.

Commentary is almost superfluous, and beyond me at this particular point. For I am enraged at watching us reenact the public humiliation rituals that we witnessed in 2020, and imported from Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China long before that time. The same internal pressure and public lobbying we saw in the James Bennet affair at the New York Times years ago — and boy doesn’t this feel ironic given the role Bennet played in shaping Coates’s career — has now been brought to bear on anyone who dares cross such an elite messiah, particularly when he bears a message beloved by the younger generations staffing the media industry. We all know why this happened, because all of this has happened before. We thought it would not happen again, and we were wrong.