With the presidential campaign down to its final weeks and hurricanes battering Florida and beyond, you may have missed the news about another storm brewing — this one at CBS News.
Apparently, some folks over there have found CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil guilty…of committing journalism.
Dokoupil was interviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, “The Message,” which is highly critical of Israel, when he asked a few tough questions about why Coates had omitted key historical facts from his anti-Israel narrative.
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?” said Dokoupil. “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?”
“There is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates replied.
I’ve been around journalism a long time — 28 years at CBS News alone — and Dokoupil’s questions struck me as perfectly legitimate. But not everyone at CBS News agrees. A staff conference call followed, led by two executives who had received complaints from some young staffers.
Wendy McMahon, president and CEO of CBS News, said that Dokoupil’s questions were not in line with the company’s “editorial standards.” Adrienne Roark, another executive, said, “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.”
According to the New York Post, Dokoupil told colleagues that he “regretted” the position he had put them in.
“What position is that exactly?” asked Matthew Hennessy in the Wall Street Journal. A proximity to real journalism?”
If this sounds familiar — young staffers revolting against old school journalism — it’s because it is familiar. From Hennessey’s column: “Young staffers at brand-name outlets have hooted at veteran colleagues for their commitment to the old-fashioned values of objectivity and neutrality. Many Gen Z and millennial reporters don’t think that’s what journalism is supposed to be. They don’t want to report on the world. They want to change it.”
He’s right, of course. But as bad as that is, what’s worse is that the supposed grownups often cave. They did at the New York Times in 2020 when the opinion page editor had the gall to publish an op-ed from a conservative U.S. senator who expressed a view the woke crowd didn’t like. The woke crowd won; the editor lost his job. And at CBS News, top brass isn’t showing much courage either.
At least one CBS News journalist showed some common sense. Washington correspondent Jan Crawford weighed in on the conference call, saying: “It sounds like we’re 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 don’t understand how Tony’s interview or any of the comments he’s made with anchors, failed to, you know, meet our editorial standards….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.”
In 1996, when I was a correspondent at CBS News, I reached a breaking point with my tolerance over liberal bias at CBS — and, more importantly, in mainstream journalism generally. I wrote an op-ed about it in the WSJ, and it touched off the media version of World War III.
Liberals were outraged. I was called a traitor. Too bad, I figured, because someone had to finally say it from inside the tent. If I was the guy, so be it.
Now we have another storm. Although history may not repeat itself, as the saying goes, it often rhymes. Now, with the controversy over what constitutes real journalism at CBS and beyond, liberals are again outraged. We didn’t call them “woke” back then and the “mob” back then didn’t cancel me — and I hope, hard as they may try, they don’t hurt Dokoupil any more than they already have. But once again, all these years after my column in the Journal, we’re still arguing about bias at CBS News.
And as Matthew Hennessy so clearly puts, “Those in positions of power in the American media should know better than to kowtow to the cancel mob. If they won’t stand up, they should stop calling themselves journalists.”
Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page.