Fine People on Both Sides of the Conversation About Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New Book — Not So Much in the CBS News C-Suite
Walter Cronkite must be turning over in his grave! What would he say if he knew that the management of CBS News — the monument to quality broadcast journalism that he himself sculpted during nearly 20 years as its anchor — got their panties in a twist last week when a hard-hitting interview of African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates broke out in the middle of a morning TV happy-talk segment?
Coates, an acclaimed author known for publishing an influential argument for U.S. government reparations to Black people in The Atlantic magazine in 2014, was all over the media last week, promoting his latest book, “The Message.” Published on Oct. 1, the book is made up of essays from reporting trips that Coates took to Senegal, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and the town of Chapin near Columbus, South Carolina. The part that got everyone talking concerns Coates’s observations of Palestinians living in Israel. He wrote of his outrage at witnessing them suffering from discriminatory treatment and policies that reminded him of the Jim Crow period in American history and apartheid in South Africa.
Tough Questions, Tough Tone
“CBS Mornings” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil took a somewhat tough tone with Coates, suggesting that portions of his book’s content would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. He also questioned why Coates had ignored the complex history of the region, and not mentioned a word about the Jewish state’s constant threat from terrorist enemies committed to its annihilation. Coates took these and other adversarial but not hostile questions in stride.
Coates calmly responded that, to him, the purported complexities are merely a smoke-screen for a simple matter of right and wrong; he said that in his worldview, treating Palestinians or any other humans as second-class citizens under a colonialist system is clearly immoral. Period.
A Few Minutes of Conversation, Multiple Millions of Views
The seven-minute interview went viral in short order. Dokoupil’s audacity to forcefully challenge Coates had severely triggered “CBS Mornings” staffers. He was also criticized for failing to identify himself as a converted Jew who has an ex-wife living with two of his children in Israel.
The offended CBS employees marched into their management’s office and demanded that Dokoupil be called on the carpet and reprimanded, or worse. CBS News executives Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark caved and rebuked Dokoupil, issuing a statement saying that the interview had not met the network’s editorial standards for impartiality. News reports say they even contemplated bringing in diversity, equity and inclusion consultants, sensitivity trainers and other arbiters of proper social behavior to help correct the problem. But saner heads prevailed.
Thankfully, the sanest and most powerful of them all was Shari Redstone, head of Paramount, which owns CBS. According to The New York Times, Redstone overruled McMahon and Roark, saying “They made a mistake here.”
Right to Safety, or Right to Know?
Dokoupil’s run-in with over-sensitive co-workers at a top-tier news organization had a happier ending than the one former New York Times opinion editor James Bennett had four years ago. Bennet green-lighted an essay by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), advocating deploying the military to quash riots across American cities in response to the police killing of George Floyd.
The Times’s management, like CBS’s last week, instead of standing up to offended sensibilities within and outside its newsroom, bowed to the pressure. They issued a statement saying the piece did not meet its editorial standards, and pulled the Cotton op-ed off its online edition. Bennett was forced to resign.
I read Cotton’s essay, and although I didn’t necessarily endorse his opinion, I strongly felt I had the right to read it. Back when I went to journalism school, our professors taught us as much. They called the wide-open public airing of disparate opinions “the marketplace of ideas.” John Milton, the 17th century English author of “Paradise Lost,” originated the philosophy, and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson supported it. Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and William O. Douglas cited it in decisions.
It basically holds that the truth will emerge from the competition of ideas in free, transparent public discourse. I’d argue that the marketplace of ideas affords considerable latitude to both the content and tone of expression. I’d also argue that both the Dokoupil interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS and the Cotton op-ed in The New York Times were both well within the standards of the marketplace of ideas — at least as it was taught to me.
The print, broadcast and online news media were never meant to be “safe spaces.” News executives who try to change that do a gross disservice to their audiences and the American people at large.
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