CBS Makes a Mockery of ‘Standards’

CBS News is experiencing a crisis of standards, the crisis being that it doesn’t appear to have any.

Network staffers met with management last week for editorial meetings centered on a September 30 interview in which CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed comic-book author Ta-Nehisi Coates to defend his new book, The Message. In the book, Coates compares Israel to the Jim Crow–era American South, questions the founding of Israel following the Holocaust, claims Israel is a state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid,” and says of a ten-day trip he took in 2023 to Israel and the West Bank, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger [sic] and more intense than in Israel.” The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” appear not even one time in any of Coates’s winding essay, which would be a bit like writing about the Spanish Civil War without mentioning the terms “Soviet Union” or “communism.”

About the Author

Becket Adams

Becket Adams is a columnist for National Review, the Washington Examiner, and The Hill.

Featured Tags

CBS News is experiencing a crisis of standards, the crisis being that it doesn’t appear to have any.

Network staffers met with management last week for editorial meetings centered on a September 30 interview in which CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed comic-book author Ta-Nehisi Coates to defend his new book, The Message. In the book, Coates compares Israel to the Jim Crow–era American South, questions the founding of Israel following the Holocaust, claims Israel is a state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid,” and says of a ten-day trip he took in 2023 to Israel and the West Bank, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger [sic] and more intense than in Israel.” The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” appear not even one time in any of Coates’s winding essay, which would be a bit like writing about the Spanish Civil War without mentioning the terms “Soviet Union” or “communism.”