CBS News showed that it can make news as well as cover it after a brutal week that saw the network add allegations of anti-Israel bias to its woes over its editing of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The network was criticized for admonishing “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil over his quizzing of author Ta-Nehisi Coates on his Israel-unfriendly book “The Message,” an interview that reportedly prompted a public reprimand at an Oct. 7 staff meeting and a round of diversity coaching.
Then an internal memo surfaced with a head-scratching geography lesson about the location of Jerusalem.
“Do not refer to it as being in Israel,” said Mark Memmott, CBS News senior director of standards and practices, in an August email to employees obtained by The Free Press.
Those taking issue with the memo included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“Jerusalem is the rightful, proper, and true capital of Israel,” Mr. Pompeo said on X. “For a news outlet to deny this goes beyond bias. It’s delusional. And it’s shameful.”
The double-whammy on Israel comes with CBS under mounting pressure to release the full, unedited transcript of “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker’s interview with Ms. Harris that aired Oct. 5.
A clip posted ahead of the interview shows Ms. Harris responding to a question about the Israel-Hamas war. During the interview, however, she was shown providing an entirely different answer to the same question.
Meghan Hays, who served as communications director for the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign, called it a “huge unforced error by CBS.” The Harris camp has denied exerting any influence on CBS to edit the interview.
“I think they should post the entire transcript online or the interview online,” she said Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Media Buzz.” “It’s miserable because the campaign doesn’t dictate this. CBS is doing a disservice to not only the viewers but to the vice president.”
Tony Dokoupil is a hero. Can’t believe @cbs censored him. Good thing its owner Shari Redstone its owner who is fair and hugely pro-Israel condemned her executives for persecuting his excellent interview. @ta_nehisi_coates_ is a completely ignoramus on Israel@and Jeremy publicly… pic.twitter.com/N1Ypn8tjn1
— Rabbi Shmuley (@RabbiShmuley) October 10, 2024
In the Sept. 30 “CBS Mornings” interview, Mr. Dokoupil asked Mr. Coates why he didn’t mention the terrorist groups that have targeted Israelis in his book comparing Israel to the “Jim Crow South.”
Adrienne Roark, CBS president for content development, said the interview fell short of the network’s “editorial standards,” while Shari Redstone, who chairs the CBS parent company Paramount Global, praised Mr. Dokoupil, saying that the network’s news leadership “made a mistake here.”
“I frankly think Tony did a great job with that interview,” Ms. Redstone said at a Wednesday panel at Advertising Week New York, according to Deadline.
“I think he handled himself and showed the world and modeled what civil discourse is. He showed that there was accountability, that there is a system of checks and balances, and frankly, I was very proud of the work that he did,” she said.
Mr. Dokoupil has met with the network’s standards and practices team as well as its Race and Culture Unit, according to the news outlet Zeteo, although CBS reportedly scrapped plans to bring in Donald Grant, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant.
Mr. Grant himself was blasted for a social-media post depicting Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina Republican, as “Uncle Tim” in a photoshopped cover of the Harriet Beecher Stowe slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” as flagged by the New York Post.
CBS News declined to comment on the Dokoupil interview or Harris interview.
As for the Jerusalem directive, a network source with knowledge of standards and practices noted that the email offered context for the decision, specifically Palestinian objections to referring to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The memo from Mr. Memmott continued: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed.
“The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem — occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war — as the capital of a future state,” he said.
CBS isn’t the only elite U.S. institution struggling with its approach to the Middle East.
Universities have also been roiled by increasingly vocal cadres of staffers and students trying to undermine Israel as it seeks to destroy Hamas and other terrorist threats following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians.
“I think what we’ve seen here is an example of a pattern we see at CBS, and we see at lots of institutions, which is to say that a loud minority political perspective gets a kind of veto on what can be said,” Oliver Wiseman, editor of The Free Press, said Sunday on “Media Buzz.”
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