Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS parent company Paramount Global and daughter of the late Jewish billionaire Sumner Redstone, backed reporter Tony Dokoupil over his handling of a controversial interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the latter’s newly published anti-Israel book.
“I frankly think Tony did a great job with that interview,” Redstone said at Advertising Week New York on Wednesday. “I think he handled himself and showed the world and modeled what civil discourse is.”
Dokoupil’s Sept. 30 interview with Coates on “CBS Mornings,” which Dokoupil co-hosts, prompted a backlash within the newsroom after he pressed Coates on why the new book, The Message, presents a one-sided, pro-Palestinian view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“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 would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.
“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?” he asked. “Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”
“No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights,” Coates replied. “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its ‘right’ is not a question that I would be faced with any other country.”
Dokoupil wrote in the New Republic in 2014 about how he was taking steps to convert to Judaism, including being circumcised. His ex-wife and their two children reportedly live in Israel.
Coates, who is black, is a former Atlantic writer, who rose to prominence covering race relations in America, including in his bestselling 2015 memoir Between the World and Me and his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic.
One of the three essays in his new book, published on Oct. 1, calls Israel an “apartheid” state and compares the treatment of Palestinians to black Americans under Jim Crow.
“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stronger and more intense than in Israel,” Coates writes. “There are aspects I found familiar—the light-skinned Palestinians who speak of ‘passing,’ the black and Arab Jews whose stories could have been staged in Atlanta instead of Tel Aviv.”
Coates’s essay, based on a single, 10-day trip to Israel in 2023 to attend the Palestine Festival of Literature and to tour with the far-left nonprofit Breaking the Silence, does not mention Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.
His sole mention of the Second Intifada, in which hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed in Palestinian suicide bombings, describes that conflict in terms of Palestinian resistance to Israeli “occupation.”
“During the Second Intifada, as Palestinians battled Israeli occupation, and cities like Hebron became combat zones, the IDF expanded its network checkpoints and enforced a curfew,” Coates writes.
CBS executives admonished Dokoupil on Monday, the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, during an editorial meeting first reported by the Free Press.
Adrienne Roark, the head of newsgathering at CBS, said that “many” people in the newsroom had complained about Dokoupil’s interview with Coates.
“After a review of our coverage, including the interview, it’s clear there are times we have not met our editorial standards,” Roark said during the meeting, per a recording that the Free Press obtained. “I want to acknowledge and apologize that it’s taken this long to have this conversation.”
Roark’s claim that Dokoupil’s interview failed to meet CBS editorial standards prompted pushback from Jan Crawford, chief legal correspondent at CBS News.
“I don’t understand how Tony’s interview or any of his comments that he’s made with anchors fail to meet our editorial standards,” Crawford said at the meeting. “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.”
“To me, that is what Tony did,” Crawford said.
The executives on the call did not answer Crawford’s questions about how Dokoupil violated CBS standards and said that they would speak to her privately after the editorial meeting.
Like many corporations faced with racially-charged controversies, CBS initially turned to a diversity, equity and inclusion “expert” to address staff. The network tapped the self-described “mental health expert, DEI strategist” and “trauma trainer” Donald Grant, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, to address an all-staff meeting on Tuesday.
CBS canceled that meeting after reporters outside the network unearthed a social media post, in which Grant photoshopped Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is black, onto a cover of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and labeled him “Uncle Tim.”
Scott used a screenshot of Grant’s post in a fundraising appeal on the Republican Party’s WinRed platform.
“The disgusting rhetoric above is exactly what’s in store for us if we allow the radical and intolerant left to win,” the senator wrote.
