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New Tit-For-Tat in Dokoupil Hubbub: Anti-Israel CBS News Strikes Back
Wednesday night brought more turns in totally unnecessary fallout from the September 30 CBS Mornings interview between co-host Tony Dokoupil and race hustler Ta-Nehisi Coates on the latter’s new book painting Israel as an apartheid state suppressing neglected Palestinians.
This time, reporting from Puck’s Dylan Byers, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, The New York Times, and Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo laid waste to what could only be mounted as the anti-Jewish staffers on CBS striking back, wondering why anyone should care so much about Jews and Israel.
First, Puck’s Dylan Byers provided another comprehensive deep dive on what he called “a fast-metastasizing, five-alarm shitshow” and described Dokoupil as “normally mild-mannered and affable,” but “came in hot” against Coates before “cool[ing]” to emphasize “some serious and significant shortcomings” about the book.
Byers pointed out there was outrage on social media following the interview, but argued it amounted to little given praise from The Washington Post and his own analysis of a “mostly quite civil and....compelling” interview of “[t]wo smart guys, actively disagreeing with one another, without resorting to screams or any sort of name-calling.”
Alas, Byers noted this wasn’t enough due to “several dozen employees in New York and abroad—foreign correspondents, morning show producers, seasoned veterans, and younger hands alike—who took issue...as well as what they perceived as his history of editorializing on the Israel-Palestine conflict” plus threats of letters from the litany of (pointless) racial journalism groups.
Byers explained Dokoupil reportedly didn’t pre-screen and script his questions through the network’s totalitarian-like Race and Culture Unit to review any future questions and scripts for “tone, content, and intention.”
After Dokoupil was dressed down in a call Monday (and on the first anniversary of Hamas’s terror attacks, no less), Byers said “many” CBS “employees” felt the Coates discussion was “the latest example of Dokoupil’s pro-Israel editorializing” and further racial hustling was cut short thanks to the planned use of a DEI consultant with an ugly social media history.
In a Tuesday call, Byers said Dokoupil was hit with claims he was “Islamophobic,” “racist,” and “xenophobic” to question Coates the way he did but, as has been reported earlier, Dokoupil didn’t officially apologize.
Byers said Dokoupil even received a call from parent company shareholder Shari Redstone “to express her unequivocal support for” him.
The lengthy Zeteo piece, penned by Justin Baragona (aka Mr. Googly Eyes), amounted to little more than meltdowns by the ultra-left, pro-Hamas pack inside CBS that seems to be not all that different from the thugs on college campuses.
In essence, what Baragona detailed was a group of far-left, pro-Hamas thugs inside CBS News have long had issues with Dokoupil’s support of Israel and Jews.
Baragona confirmed many of Byers’s details, but with a predictable tilt. It started from the beginning with Baragona whining that Dokoupil might “go unpunished” for having “defiantly admitted...he openly violated the network’s standards and practices” and would continue asking Palestinian guests whether they believe Israel can exist.
Try and not get the sense from these excerpts the thoughts of Zeteo sources don’t have at least a slight anti-Semitic tinge to them, claiming “a very loud” group of “pro-Israeli” employees are trying “to ‘intimidate’ them”.
At one point, he whined Dokoupil must think “he is above the law” and “that the rules don’t apply to him” because....well, you know why (click “expand”):
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, five CBS News employees told Zeteo that the leaked audio of Monday’s call to Bari Weiss’ fervent pro-Israel outlet, The Free Press, may have been a message to “intimidate” them into silence. Claiming that the majority of the newsroom supports network chief Wendy McMahon and head of newsgathering Adrienne Roark for initially rebuking Dokoupil, they noted the “chilling effect” a very loud pro-Israeli minority – many of whom hold senior positions – can have on them speaking out about biased coverage of Israel and Palestine.
(....)
Lost in all of this kerfuffle, though, is the fact that Dokoupil, by his own admission, believes that he is above the law. While the network has strictly defined rules that the rest of his news colleagues follow, Dokoupil essentially let them know on Tuesday that those rules don’t apply to him.
Meanwhile, morale continues to sink at CBS News over how this has all played out, especially with Tuesday’s meeting falling apart quickly, which left Thomas – who oversaw the meeting – in tears.
Still, a network insider pointed out that “there’s an enormous amount of support for Wendy and Adrienne and the team who reviewed this and worked on this.”
(....)
Journalism ethics experts have criticized Dokoupil’s “gotcha” and “performative” questions that were designed to put Coates on the defensive.
(....)
The narrative that had quickly coalesced around the Monday meeting, meanwhile, left many at CBS wondering if the leaks themselves had been “orchestrated” by some of the network’s pro-Israel staffers to intimidate those complaining about Dokoupil into silence. Some even felt that Crawford’s “performance” during that meeting seemed “rehearsed.”
“The first leak, and then you know, the fact that somebody was live-texting to Puck has had a chilling effect on those who are just trying to get our journalism to be fair and balanced,” a network insider told Zeteo.
Another CBS employee said that they wanted “to present a counter-narrative to the one that's been out there that Tony has a bedrock of support at CBS News, which is not true.” The staffer noted that “with the exception of their failure to acknowledge this in a timely fashion,” Roark and McMahon “have the support of CBS News when it comes to their very impassioned defense of just leaving your bias at the door.”
For a site run by a former MSNBC and al-Jazeera host who’s openly pro-Gazan, Baragona had the cajones to claim Dokoupil’s off base for “editorializing” “over the last year” about the Middle East.
Most chilling was this remarkable quote from a CBS source prior to summaries of two examples (one of which we praised Dokoupil for here with the other segment available here): “If Tony would just shut the fuck up, none of this would be happening.”
What went viral Wednesday night, though, was something Byers also reported, which was the blatant admission questions are pre-screened and scripted in advance, which King then allegedly relayed at least in part to Coates prior to the interview (though it didn’t matter given Dokoupil’s approach).
Over at The Times, they lamented that Dokoupil’s big interview with Coates “proved divisive on social media” and confirmed Baragona’s story about long-simmering concerns about Dokoupil speaking positively of Jews (click “expand”):
As far back as May, a group of CBS staff members raised concerns about Mr. Dokoupil’s coverage on a call with the network’s president at the time, Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, according to two people familiar with the call.
Mr. Dokoupil’s interview with Mr. Coates resurfaced those concerns, and late last week, a group of CBS News employees approached management, according to two people with knowledge of the events, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions.
On Friday, Mr. Dokoupil met with members of the network’s standards team and its race and culture unit, which advises on “context, tone and intention” of programming. The discussion focused on the anchor’s tenor and body language during his exchange with Mr. Coates.
All these concerns jived with new reporting from The Free Press. Editor Oliver Wiseman had a scoop that, in August, “an email to all CBS News employees” by a senior executive to choose their words careful when talking about Israel and specifically not refer to any area of Jerusalem as part of Israel (click “expand”):
In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.
Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”
He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
Wiseman delivered this chilling assessment from “one CBS employee” that “[t]here is a huge difference between how all ethnic or minority groups are treated and how Jews and Jewish issues are treated” and Jews should consider avoid pitching any story profiling “Jews or Jewish issues.”
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