This article is long but also full of insane details, so I’m gonna add a summary with the main excerpts but I encourage you to read it all if you have the time.
TL:DR the biggest takeaway is that although by his own admission, Tony violated protocol, he will not be punished. Although his interview has been highly criticized, Tony is committed to repeating this line of questioning, even with Palestinian guests. And although the majority of CBS disagrees, the higher ups (and the ADL/Bari Weiss who have heavily involved themselves) believe it’s his right to “ask tough questions.”
CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil defiantly admitted in a Tuesday staff meeting that he openly violated the network’s standards and practices during his explosive interview on Palestine with award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, sources familiar with the matter told Zeteo.
Network employees said that prior to Tuesday’s meeting being torpedoed, Dokoupil was confronted by one staffer who said his comments during the Sept. 30 segment with Coates were “racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic.” While the anchor remained respectful and calm during the charged meeting and apologized for making others “feel uncomfortable,” he fully defended the way he conducted the interview.
At the same time, Dokoupil was pressed by staffers in the Tuesday meeting on how he would handle an interview with a Palestinian guest. Asserting that he would treat it the same way as his conversation with Coates, the anchor said he’d ask the guest about their politics and whether they agreed that Israel has a right to exist.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, five CBS News employees told Zeteo that the leaked audio of Monday’s call to Bari Weiss’ fervent pro-Israel outlet, The Free Press, may have been a message to “intimidate” them into silence.
Claiming that the majority of the newsroom supports network chief Wendy McMahon and head of newsgathering Adrienne Roark for initially rebuking Dokoupil, they noted the “chilling effect” a very loud pro-Israeli minority – many of whom hold senior positions – can have on them speaking out about biased coverage of Israel and Palestine.
Sources said that while Tuesday’s meeting featured the network’s head of standards and practices admonishing Dokoupil for ignoring CBS protocols during the Coates interview, it appears that the ‘CBS Mornings’ anchor will go unpunished. Shari Redstone, head of CBS parent Paramount Global, has told network executives that she doesn’t believe that the host violated any standards and disagrees with the way the situation has been handled.
Despite Redstone’s expressing her frustration with the way CBS News management handled the matter, CBS CEO and Paramount co-chief George Cheeks sent out a statement of support for McMahon on Wednesday.
Furthermore, the Anti-Defamation League met with McMahon this week and made it clear that Dokoupil merely challenged Coates’ “one-sided” views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and did nothing wrong. ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt also let CBS know that it was “insensitive” to reprimand Dokoupil – who is Jewish – on Oct. 7, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
Lost in all of this kerfuffle, though, is the fact that Dokoupil, by his own admission, believes that he is above the law. While the network has strictly defined rules that the rest of his news colleagues follow, Dokoupil essentially let them know on Tuesday that those rules don’t apply to him.
The Final Straw
Even before Coates was all but accused of being an antisemitic terrorist by Dokoupil last week, the CBS anchor had raised eyebrows at the network over the past year with his overt editorializing, especially regarding topics involving Israel and Gaza.“If Tony would just shut the fuck up, none of this would be happening,” one CBS insider told Zeteo.
Internal Uproar
McMahon and Roark were quickly inundated with complaints and questions about Dokoupil’s behavior from several dozen staffers. With tensions boiling over, it appeared the pair had determined to address the matter in the next editorial call. Meanwhile, Dokoupil sat down with the network’s standards and practices team and members of the Race and Culture Unit. He also separately met with Burleson and King, as well as members of the show’s staff.Without naming Dokoupil, McMahon and Roark quoted from the network’s handbook while noting that the interview and Dokoupil’s editorializing at the end of other reporters’ segments didn’t meet editorial standards.
“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,” Roark said.
CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford took issue with the bosses’ reprimand of Dokoupil, rushing to her colleague’s defense. Besides defending Dokoupil, she also called Coates a fraud, according to three sources who were on the call.
“Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network that was completely devoid of history or facts. As someone who does a lot of interviews, I’m not sure now how to proceed in challenging viewpoints that are obviously one-sided and devoid of fact and history,” Crawford said in audio that was leaked to The Free Press.
Weiss, who published selected recordings of the Monday meeting, quickly framed the call as a journalist being wrongly punished for grilling a hero to the liberal elite. CBS soon found itself facing backlash for supposedly throwing its anchor under the bus for daring to challenge Coates.
Critics, and not just conservatives, railed against CBS staffers who complained about Dokoupil, calling them “woke” and saying they were apparently traumatized by the anchor for merely conducting a tough but fair interview of a “favored guest.”
The narrative that had quickly coalesced around the Monday meeting, meanwhile, left many at CBS wondering if the leaks (to Bari Weiss’s “Free Press” news outlet) themselves had been “orchestrated” by some of the network’s pro-Israel staffers to intimidate those complaining about Dokoupil into silence. Some even felt that Crawford’s “performance” during that meeting seemed “rehearsed.”
A staffer added: “The majority of CBS News was entirely disturbed and perturbed by Jan's outburst and, moreover, her slandering of Coates as a fraudster.”
Posted by Yappyee