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A bestselling author has defended under-fire CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil after he was criticized for a tense on-air exchange over the conflict in the Middle East. The hostile segment came last Monday on the network’s CBS Morning show, when host Dokoupil launched into an aggressive line of questioning with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates was promoting his new book The Message, which includes a section on the Israel-Palestine conflict, leading Dokoupil to question him on his apparent antipathy towards Israel . CBS News reportedly condemned Dokoupil for failing to meet its ‘standards’ after the interview, however Coates has jumped to his defense and said he was not offended by the segment.
‘I don’t really have a problem with a tough interview,’ Coates said in a Tuesday appearance with Democracy Now . ‘I knew when I wrote (the book) I would be confronted.’ Coates continued in his follow-up interview that his only concern surrounding the CBS segment, and the subsequent controversy, was a double standard on ‘who was excluded from the conversation.’ ‘Was (Dokoupil) rude? Was he aggressive? I can’t really get into that, it’s not really something I think too much about,’ he said.
‘The question I would ask though is how often… on any major news organization, do you see someone who is a defender of the Israeli state project get confronted in that kind of way?’ When Dokoupil interviewed Coates last week, his combative angle began with his very first question, as he told Coates that if he published his book without his bestselling author name on it, the text ‘would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.’
Dokoupil, who is Jewish, continued with a series of combative questions regarding Coates’ stance on the Middle East crisis. ‘Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?’ he asked. ‘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?’ The segment sparked backlash from some online, and led a group of CBS News employees to raise concerns over Dokoupil’s approach with executives, which in turn led the network to officially rebuke the interview for falling short of its standards.
Top CBS executives reportedly held a newsroom-wide call to address the staff complaints about Dokoupil’s interview, according to the New York Times . The outlet added that at least one veteran CBS journalist defended Dokoupil on the call and said they didn’t see what he had done wrong. Adrienne Roark, the network’s president of editorial and newsgathering, told the group that the interview did not ‘meet our editorial standards’, but said it ‘has been addressed, and it will continue to be in the future.’ Dokoupil remains on the air. But Dokoupil – seen as a rising star on the network – has faced a week of outrage over the segment with Coates, with many critics taking to social media to slam his aggressive questioning of the author.
Coates responded in the interview by telling Dokoupil that there is ‘no shortage of that perspective in American media’, and that he attempted to offer a different viewpoint by focusing his book on a 12-day trip he took to Jerusalem. In one particularly tense back-and-forth, Dokoupil asked Coates: ‘What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?’ ‘There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state,’ Coates responded. ‘I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.’ ‘Either apartheid is right or wrong. It’s really, really simple,’ Coates added later in the segment. After Dokoupil’s two co-hosts sat in stunned silence for almost the entirety of the six-minute interview, the segment ended with laughs as Dokoupil told Coates he was ‘still invite to the High Holidays.’
When CBS executives rebuked Dokoupil’s approach, they notably did so on October 7, the anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks one year ago. Remarks from the meeting were quickly shared by The Free Press , which reported that Roark told employees that despite it’s admonishment of Dokoupil’s interview, ‘we will still hold people accountable. That’s part of our job.’ ‘But we will do so objectively, and that means very plainly checking our biases and opinions at the door, and that applies to every single one of us,’ she said.
In response, Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent, defended Dokoupil on the call and said she didn’t see why his questioning of Coates’ stance on Israel was a problem. ‘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,’ Crawford said. ‘To me, that is what Tony did.’
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