CBS Has its New York Times (and NPR) Moment

What's at Stake Here Isn't DEI or Harm--But Rather Whether or Not Liberal and Progressive Ideas are Allowed to be Challenged Substantively in Public

Photo by Philippe Murray-Pietsch on Unsplash

Thank goodness for The Free Press. I’ve already laid out on this Substack that for all her “truth-telling,” it seems obvious that Bari Weiss has her own biases and triggers that show up in her online paper and perhaps chief among them is that her Jewishness colors the way she sees the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Like the rest of us, she could probably try a little harder to show some understanding across that difference, though I think both her perspective and her doggedness as a journalist 100% belongs in the public square. She also shouldn’t have to endure a newsroom where people are whispering about her across the room or building. Thankfully even her old paper seems to have attempted to address some of what led her out of the New York Times, a decision that—given the success of The Free Press—surely had to be bad business for “the paper of record.”

Regardless, the past week was a good indication of why Weiss’s current project is so necessary and important, and it’s not just that she will report politically incorrect stories about true things that happen, though she will of course do those things. It’s also the way that willingness goes downstream. If Weiss is reporting on something real that other outlets might have been tempted to pass on there’s a subtle way in which their projects might “look bad” and their own awareness of this may just give them pause enough to give something important but inconvenient a second look and the attention it deserves. And, when all else fails, if there are absurdities happening that are occurring and attempting to be hidden in backrooms, people know they have somewhere to go where they might be taken seriously. Whether those whistles are given the opportunity to blow for moral or business decisions honestly doesn’t matter very much: the public has a stake and interest in what’s happening around the world, even when it’s media that’s becomes the story.

This time it was CBS. It started with a late-September interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who made a name for himself while writing for The Atlantic, though he no longer works there. He was on this particular morning show to talk about his new book, The Message. I have not read the book, so I will do my best not to comment on it until I have had a chance to do so, but it is my understanding that the book is about the power of stories to shape reality, and there are three political-ish stories that he plays out as examples, with the biggest being an experience he had in the Palestinian Territories. What Coates said in the interview is something I’ve watched (more than once), so my interpretation of the events will keep have that conversation—and what was at stake in the conversation—in mind.

Things got interesting when Tony Dokoupil—a respected, 40-something journalist—quickly began challenging Coates about Israel specifically. Dokoupil is, as I understand it, Jewish, though by conversion rather than heritage, and I will concede that Dokoupil’s tone was confrontational. The disagreement, then, I suppose, is whether or not that’s appropriate, and my argument is that, for the most part, yes, it is, so long as the confrontation is about ideas, which I think Dokoupil’s exchange with Coates was. It would be different if the line of questioning was some sort of “red herring” ad hominem, but it was not.

Dokoupil’s first question warms up with “the content of (the Israel section) would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” Maybe that was harsher as a frame than was necessary, and the word “extremist” does a lot of work without being very precise, so again, I would have tried to choose a better way to say that. But what followed was a much more real conversation than would have occurred if Dokoupil had chosen an easier route, and his questions improved after the first one: Including: “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? 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, and is it because you you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

Suffice it to say—Israel aside, though I think it works here, too—that if you could boil down my own questions and frustrations about the contemporary left I have encountered especially as an adult in the U.S. during the past couple decades, Dokoupil’s question pretty much nails it. Why would we ever have to edit truth to get to justice, might be another way of saying it. The subtle answer that I get over and over again in my own head is that the pursuit isn’t really aiming at justice, or it wouldn’t be so threatened by the truth. The aim is, instead—consciously or subconsciously—power. It’s revenge. It’s control. At its worse, even subjugation, and with Israel in particular, it is fascinating and terrifying to watch very smart people uncomfortably dance around questions about whether eliminating the country altogether might be in the plans.

Which isn’t to say that Coates was that uncomfortable with the question. Like Dijonai Carrington with Christine Brennan after the infamous Caitlin Clark eye poke during the first round of the WNBA Playoffs, Coates was perfectly capable of handling himself when challenged. That’s both to his credit and to be expected. I’m sure Coates in particular anticipated the question, and his answer was well-thought-out, even if it bothers me a little bit.

He started by saying that Dokoupil’s perspective is well-represented by American media, whereas the stories of Palestinians aren’t. Hmm. I would like to know more about what he means. Here is the Washington Post on how young Americans (in their twenties) skew pretty heavily Palestinian in their sympathies. Here is the Washington Post on the human rights violations of the war. Here is the Washington Post arguing that Palestinian families in the West Bank get no justice. Here is the Washington Post showing how much opposition to Israel’s war there is around the world. Here is the Washington Post criticizing the statements of Israeli leaders. Here is the Washington Post claiming that Israel is committing war crimes.

Now I am not saying those perspectives shouldn’t be a part of the public debate we have about Israel and Palestine. They most assuredly should be! But to suggest that the stories and arguments of Palestinians don’t exist in American media, come on. There is plenty of Palestinian sympathy and even the tracking down of their stories on the ground, but if we have to argue about that, let us do it empirically for the empirical claim that it is.

There’s a fascinating segment from a recent episode of The Glenn Show where Brown economist Glenn Loury is surprisingly lauding Coates’ book (this makes me, again, want to read it), while John McWhorter just keeps giving him weird looks, like really? McWhorter’s beef about Coates probably is not too far from my own: I think Coates is a first-rate thinker (and maybe writer, too, though while I have read some of his work I probably haven’t read enough of it to have a say on the matter) who refuses to let himself be a first-rate thinker because he has, like, too many moral concerns or something.

That doesn’t square to me because my frame for comparison is someone like Martin Luther King Jr. MLK was a moralistic (and religious) activist who had success producing political and cultural change because he was a first-rate student and thinker. We are less likely to get to real problem-solving from lazy diagnosing. Several years ago I was able to tour King’s childhood home in Atlanta, and there are a couple of things that stood out to me about the visit. First of all, his home was way larger than the one I grew up in; he was middle class (just as Coates more than is now). But the other thing that struck me about King is that he’d been in a family that had required him to have read a certain amount of the Bible and newspaper read before showing up to the dinner table (and to be ready to talk about it).

Anyway, let’s get to Coates’ moral concerns. He says on CBS that “I wrote a 260-page book” that isn’t or doesn’t have to be a comprehensive history of the conflict has a whole. Fine. Dokoupil pushes Coates on why the idea of Jewish state seems to offend him, and Coates pushes right back by saying it’s not a Jewish state in particular that bothers him, but rather a state being built on “ethnocracy” is the problem. Dokoupil throws in “Muslim included?” and of course Islam is a religion not an ethnicity, but the logic is correct in that it does hint at the inherent tension that, again, a certain brand of contemporary Progressive doesn’t want to have to answer for (because it’s too inconvenient). Which is: these countries around Israel aren’t bastions of freedom and diversity, for god’s sake! But they never seem to be under the same kind of constant moral scrutiny, so the question is why, and the burden of answering that goes on the folks who are so insistent of the contradiction in the first place.

As Coates continued on with his answers, he waxes poetically about how he, basically a black American tourist, has more “rights” than Palestinians who live there. Now this is a good argument worth hearing and one that could win plenty of consensus if we were at least consistent with its application. But key to Coates’ continued logic is “Either apartheid is right or its wrong.” He then uses the example of the death penalty, and he explains that he opposes it no matter whether the person receiving it did nothing at all or something really awful. I am with him on that. But if I had been in the room with Coates and Dokoupil the next question I would have asked him is, “How do you define ‘apartheid?’” To which, the average coy person on today’s left would mostly act like it’s a ridiculous question (so they don’t have to offer a definition, which would force an accountability mechanism for contexts other than the one at hand).

The follow-up question would then be something like, ‘What about the several countries in the Middle East where it’s illegal to be gay? Where, in some places, one can even be executed for such a thing?’ Does that constitute apartheid or no? And if the answer is, ‘No, we’re obviously talking about ethnicity here,’ well, then this argument really isn’t about people, is it? And if it’s not about people, than maybe it’s more about politics and winning, and people like Coates might just be more honest if they would say, ‘Well, we’ve decided the Palestinians are on our side, we like them, but not so much with the Jews.’ Now King, again, developed appeals—like James Baldwin, for the most part—that were universal. You don’t get to justice for Palestinians by dehumanizing the Jews and forgetting about Middle Eastern gay people. I suppose another thing that could be said is, ‘Well, the U.S. supports Israel but not those other places,’ to which we would want to, first of all, take a hard look at Saudi Arabia, but also we would want to deal with the fact that U.S. does, in fact, give billions of dollars to Palestinians.

So maybe what you could say is that the U.S. supports both Israel and Palestinians, but they support Israel more. At which we would probably want to look at both what kind of government Israel has in comparison to its neighbors, but also the security issue. I doubt I am much different from most Americans in that I would be thrilled for the Palestinians to either 1) have their own official state or 2) to be more fully-integrated citizens of Israel. But that would have to come as part of an exchange whereby they commit a lot more effort to both the building of government and public infrastructure (and not just hand over leadership to Hamas, as happened in Gaza) and to internal efforts to stop the use of terrorism. You get more rights, but you also have more responsibilities. Because the difference between gay people in, say, Egypt or Iran, and Palestinians in and just outside of Israel is that there are actually legitimate threats among the Palestinians. No, all Palestinians aren’t terrorists, but there are terrorists who are Palestinians and who operate in the Palestinians Territories.

So far I have said a lot more here about Coates and Israel/the Palestinians than I have about CBS. But most of the above is just context. The recent media bombshell, dropped by The Free Press, was that—apparently after some internal pressure was starting to mount—there had been an editorial meeting on October 7th for God’s sake in which Dokoupil got passively scolded and a lot of lip service was given by CBS CEO Wendy McMahon to the way in which “editorial standards” had apparently been broken and to remind the company’s staff that “personal feelings” need to get “set aside” for interviews. This was all on recording that obviously someone in the meeting had turned over to the independent outlet.

McMahon even laughably reminded CBS journalists that “neutrality” was the aim. There’s a lot worth arguing in all of this, but let me say, as I’ve said before, that I don’t think journalists are ever “objective” or “neutral.” Our humanness doesn’t allow it, and that’s fine. But I do think we’re capable of fairness. The part of this that’s confusing, though, is that it was Dokoupil who was pushing Coates to be more fair on a deeply-charged and -entrenched historical conflict. To her credit, legal correspondent Jan Crawford was courageously willing to challenge all the meeting’s political speak and to ask how, exactly, editorial standards had not been met. That’s called integrity, though of course her question was blown off. “I think what I want to do,” McMahon said to Crawford, “is talk to you personally….right afterwards.”

For his part, Coates has said since the CBS interview in his own conversation with Trevor Noah that he thought Dokoupil “commandeered” the interview in a way that left out the other two interviewers. That’s probably a fair assessment, though one has to wonder if Dokoupil did that to make sure real questions get asked of Coates about his book. Meanwhile, CBS has since intended to bring in Dr. Donald Grant to help its staffers process the “trauma” of being subject to the Coates/Dokoupil exchange, but that plan got scrapped after it was discovered from his social media presence that he—shock of all shocks—is a bit of a left-wing partisan hack.

We really do deserve better than all this nonsense from our institutions—both media and education—that ought to be most concerned with (and least threatened by) truth.