Do not ask questions. Do not challenge established dogma. Do not confront favored subjects. These are the rules at legacy media outlets in 2024. In order to be a journalist at one of these favored institutions, one essentially has to agree not to do any journalism at all.
On Sept. 30, CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil put his job at risk when he decided not to abide by this modern paradox.
Author and progressive activist Ta-Nehisi Coates sat down for an interview with the anchors of CBS’s flagship morning show, including Dokoupil, to discuss his new book, The Message. The book contains a large section on the plight of Palestinians and rejects the idea that the conflict in Gaza is at all “complicated”: Israel is the aggressor, and the Palestinians are its victims.
Dokoupil, who is of Jewish descent and has children living in Israel, challenged him. The longtime journalist, who previously worked at outlets such as Newsweek, the Daily Beast, and NBC News, asked Coates fairly standard questions about the Israel-Gaza conflict: Does Israel have a right to exist? Why does your book not mention that Israel is surrounded by people who want to eliminate it, including Hamas? Why leave out the details of the intifadas against the Jewish people? Coates answered the questions, and the interview ended on good terms. No harm, no foul, right?
Except on Oct. 7, of all days, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack against Israel, Dokoupil was thrown under the bus by CBS leadership. Apparently, some CBS staffers were incensed that Dokoupil dared to raise serious questions about an awfully serious topic and complained to top brass. Instead of reaffirming its commitment to journalism, CBS leadership claimed during a staff meeting that the segment did not meet its editorial standards and effectively accused Dokoupil of allowing his personal biases to steer the interview.
Journalists often have to cover topics that are personal to us, and Dokoupil ought to be applauded for the fact that his questions, though intense, remained respectful and were well within the bounds of professionalism. More importantly, Dokoupil provided balance to Coates’s one-sided presentation of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Coates in his book compares the Palestinians to African Americans subjected to slavery and Jim Crow laws in the United States. Further, he argues the mere 10 days he spent in the region gave him the unique moral clarity to speak definitively on a complex struggle that has been going on for 76 years — much longer for the Jews, who were expelled from Israel by the Romans about two millennia ago. In separate interviews, Coates said he doesn’t care what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023, and that if he grew up in the same conditions as the Palestinians, he may not be above an attack that saw the rapes and murders of innocent civilians.
Coates’s appearance on CBS was hardly the normal fare of a light morning show, where children’s book authors and romance novelists hawk their latest wares, and it deserved the scrutiny it got from Dokoupil.
Nonetheless, Dokoupil was further grilled by other CBS staffers in a follow-up meeting on Oct. 8. CBS employees openly wept on the call and accused him of xenophobia and islamophobia. CBS’s Standards and Practices division chided Dokoupil for not running his questions through the network’s Race and Culture and Standards and Practices divisions, although it admitted it couldn’t find any problem with his questions, just his “tone of voice, phrasing, and body language,” according to Puck News. I’m old enough to remember when leftists hated “tone-policing.” Worse still, reports said that CBS wanted to bring in “DEI expert” Dr. Donald Grant to moderate one of the all-staff meetings. Those plans were scrapped when it was revealed that Grant had once posted a caricature of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) as an “Uncle Tom.”
After all that, CBS decided that it would not discipline Dokoupil for the interview. But why was that even on the table? Why on earth would an outlet ever punish a journalist for doing his or her job?
The ridiculousness of the situation is highlighted even further by CBS’s obvious double standards. The network strongly defended Dokoupil co-host Gayle King for allegedly telling Coates what she planned to ask about ahead of the interview. It also had nothing to say about her own grilling of Israeli father Thomas Hand in November 2023 regarding Hamas’s kidnapping of his 8-year-old daughter. Hand described the difficulty of living in Israel amid constant rocket barrages and the importance of bringing his daughter home from captivity. King responded by pressing him on how the situation “seems to be all about politics” and made sure to mention the “innocent children and Palestinians dying.” Were these questions run through the CBS Standards and Practices division?
Unfortunately, the Dokoupil debacle is only the latest instance of CBS abandoning journalistic principles in favor of blind activism for preferred political actors and narratives. It is under fire for chopping and screwing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, going well beyond normal edits for time and clarity to obscure Harris’s response to a question on the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomacy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During the vice presidential debate in early October, anchor Margaret Brennan broke the agreed-upon “no fact-checking” rule so that she could “clarify” comments made by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s running mate, about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. Last year, the network laid off award-winning journalist Catherine Herridge, locked her out of her office, and seized her files. She strongly suggested to me during an interview in August that the network had hamstrung her efforts to look into the Hunter Biden laptop: “I have a reputation for moving quickly and efficiently through complex investigations. It did not take me two years to validate the contents of that laptop.”
CBS hardly stands alone in its approach to information: totally incurious about stories that could damage the Left, rabid dogs inventing scandal for the Right. The assumption has long been that liberal media bias is mainly the result of left-wing leadership pulling and prodding staff along preferred editorial lines. That is sometimes true, as in Herridge’s case. But a more prevalent problem in the past decade is what happened to Dokoupil.
Mostly low-level staffers who are more interested in using their outlet’s platforms for activism than adhering to any kind of journalistic principle demand complete ideological purity from the newsroom. They organize internal revolts against management and noncompliant colleagues and trash their employers on social media if the outlet dares to cover stories of which they do not approve. Newsroom leadership, unaccustomed to dealing with such underhanded and unprofessional behavior and terrified of becoming victims of the mob, usually play along. Take the anodyne Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) op-ed that was published in the New York Times, which led to the removal of the paper’s opinion editor.
I lay out in my book, The Snowflakes’ Revolt, the parallels between this behavior and that of the illiberal Left on college campuses that harasses conservative students and heckles administrators into shutting down speech and adopting woke policies. Conservatives were laughed off for warning that these students might soon pose a problem in the real world. Now, with many of them concentrated in elite institutions like the media, the toxic effects are obvious and widespread.
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Adults in the room need to take charge and refuse to cow to the unserious graphic designers and race reporters leading newsroom riots. Paramount Global Chairwoman Shari Redstone did the right thing by defending Dokoupil, stating publicly that he did a “great job.” So did Dokoupil, who offered “regrets” to staff whose jobs he made more difficult but did not apologize for or back down from his handling of the interview. Earlier this year, the New York Times explicitly condemned staff who aligned with activist groups to trash the paper’s coverage of LGBT issues.
The response to people who work at media outlets but don’t believe in journalism should always be: “I’m sorry you feel that way. Now please find employment elsewhere.”
Amber Duke is Washington editor of the Spectator and author of The Snowflakes’ Revolt: How Woke Millennials Hijacked American Media.