News journalists be forewarned: Do not dare to assertively challenge anyone making baseless claims about Israel.
That, at least, is the message to be learned from what can be called the Dokoupil Affair. Tony Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism, is an anchor of the morning news program CBS Mornings. His ex-wife lives in Israel with two of his children.
Last Sunday, Dokoupil was one of three CBS anchors interviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist and author known primarily for writing on race, who is on the publicity circuit promoting his new book, The Message.
The book contains three essays, one of them a one-sided, anti-Israeli polemic.
Dokoupil politely but firmly challenged Coates on the book; more accurately, he challenged him for what was missing from the book: any context.
“I have to say, when I read the book, 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 [on Israel] would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.
“So then I found myself wondering: Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates… leave out so much?” he asked his interviewee. “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 second intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”
One voice is heard over the other, apparently
Coates replied essentially that he was not writing the definitive book on the Israel-Palestine conflict but rather just trying to give voice to those who don’t have one. The Israeli perspective, the one Dokoupil presented, is well represented in American media, he claimed, but not the Palestinian one.
Huh?
Does Coates not read The New York Times or The Washington Post? Does he not watch CNN or MSNBC? Doesn’t he even tune into CBS, whose senior director of standards reportedly sent an email to all CBS News employees in late August telling them not to say Jerusalem is in Israel?
“Its status is disputed,” CBS News senior director of standards Mark Memmott said, adding that it “goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Yet Coates says the Palestinian perspective does not get air time?!
The oft-repeated line used by Israel bashers that they are bravely giving voice to a narrative crushed and censored by the established media is as ridiculous as it is tired.
Here’s a news flash for Coates, a man who – like Walt Mearsheimer and Peter Beinart before him – is riding Israel-bashing into much greater celebrity than he ever would enjoy in his regular pursuits: These days, in the legacy media, it takes more courage to defend Israel than to slam it.
Just ask Dokoupil.
Last Tuesday, Bari Weiss’s Free Press reported that Dokoupil was raked over the CBS coals for, basically, just doing his job: asking an interviewee tough questions, and not letting an interviewee’s assertions, which lacked both historical context and factual basis, go unchallenged.
At CBS – the network of legendary journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite – Dokoupil challenged Coates, as they would have done, and was reprimanded for it.
During its editorial meeting last Monday, The Free Press reported, the network’s senior officials “all but apologized for the interview to staff.”
Adrienne Roark, in charge of news gathering at the network, said: “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door.”
Which, of course, is utter nonsense.
As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus aptly pointed out, imagine if a gay anchor were interviewing an author hostile to LGBTQ+ rights or a Black interviewer pressed hard against someone opposed to affirmative action or efforts to increase diversity.
“If they allowed some personal feelings to slip in, if they failed to check their ‘biases and opinions at the door,’ would they be greeted with a revolt among their colleagues and reprimands by their bosses?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
Neither do we, and this whole sorry affair bespeaks a double journalistic standard regarding Israel that CBS should be ashamed of and which the public should simply not tolerate.