A CBS News reporter made Ta-Nehisi Coates face some difficult questions about his recent focus on criticizing Israel, and the network began to implode in the aftermath.
Tony Dokoupil challenged the author while he was a guest on “CBS Mornings” for giving a one-sided view of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in his new book.
‘There are times we fail our audiences and each other … And we’re at a tipping point.’
“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 cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?” Dokoupil asked.
“And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?” he added.
Coates responded that there was no “shortage” of people in the media with Dokoupil’s narrative and that he wrote the book in order to hear the voice of the unheard and not to give an entire treatise of the situation in the Middle East.
While the exchange was only mildly contentious, CBS News is imploding over criticism about the interview.
Officials at the network reportedly apologized for the interview during an editorial meeting Monday and claimed that it did not meet up with the “editorial standards” of the network. The Free Press obtained audio from the meeting and published some of the exchange.
“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,” said Adrienne Roark, who is in charge of news gathering.
“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,” she added.
CBS News then reportedly hired a DEI strategist to moderate the next discussion about the interview on Tuesday.
Coates is known as being an advocate of extreme critical race theory, including the historically dubious 1619 project.
The interview with Coats can be viewed in its entirety at the YouTube channel for CBS Mornings.
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