A “CBS Mornings” anchor who pressed woke activist Ta-Nehisi Coates on his new book about the Israel-Gaza conflict was forced to meet with the network’s “Race and Culture Unit.”
Tony Dokoupil spent an hour with the CBS News standards and practices team and its in-house Race and Culture Unit, during which he was lectured about the tone, phrasing, and body language he used during his interview with Coates, The New York Times reported.
Following this meeting, Dokoupil met with staffers and told them he “regretted putting his colleagues in that position especially the ones overseas and in danger,” an insider at the network told the New York Post.
“There were tears. [People were] very upset,” the source told the Post, saying that staffers were “divided” on the situation in Israel and “troubled” by Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates.
Sources told the Post that Dokoupil didn’t apologize for his questioning, which pressed Coates on his views of Palestinians as perpetual victims, The Daily Wire previously reported.
“For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere,” Coates wrote in his book, according to CNN.
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Dokoupil, who is Jewish, pressed Coates on this particular framing.
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said in the interview, according to CNN.
Dokoupil also pushed Coates to answer why he left out so many facts in the book that are beneficial to Israel.
“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?” Dokoupil asked.
Coates didn’t get upset or hostile toward Dokoupil’s questioning and responded by saying his book was not supposed to be an exact history of the conflict but about a different perspective, even though the perspective he put forth is the dominating one in academic and media circles.
“I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice,” Coates told Dokoupil.
Following the interview, some correspondents and producers at CBS complained that Dokoupil was biased toward Israel and showed that bias during his interview with Coates.
On Monday, CBS News and Stations president and CEO Wendy McMahon and her top deputy Adrienne Roark informed staff that the interview did not meet the network’s standards for impartiality, Puck News’ Dylan Byers reported.
While Dokoupil was forced into a meeting and to apologize to co-workers, CBS did nothing when anchor Gayle King lectured the father of an eight-year-old Israeli girl who was being held hostage by Hamas that he needed to have compassion for Palestinians as well.
WATCH: CBS’s Gayle King LECTURES the father of a eight-year-old Israeli girl being held hostage by Hamas that “innocent children in Pales –Palestinians…are dying” too just as “innocent Israeli children” and, b/c of “politics,” “no one seems to be able to say enough, stop” pic.twitter.com/5qkg2QUMNn
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 15, 2023
