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The uproar over his interview with CBS’s Tony Dokoupil shows the double standards of US public life
Any notion that the debate about Israel in the aftermath of the horrors of the Hamas massacre could not get any more morally twisted was dispelled on Monday afternoon when CBS – America’s legendary “Tiffany Network” – admonished one of its leading morning news anchors for daring to do his job.
The anchor, Tony Dokoupil, was reportedly brow-beaten by his bosses for allegedly showing bias during an interview last week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Dokoupil, who is white and Jewish, challenged some of the claims within Coates’ new book, The Message, part of which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Coates’ proffers two conceits in The Message – the first, that Israel is a segregationist apartheid state, perhaps the most racialised and racist nation to exist today. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his view, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians within its territorial control is akin to the cruelty of America’s Jim Crow South.
Coates’ second launching point is equally spurious: that he has a right – if not an obligation – to expose Israel’s supposed evils because he is African-American, because he and the Palestinians somehow bear a shared history as “conquered people”.
The problem, as Dokoupil tried to highlight, is that charges of Israeli “apartheid” are both contested and highly-politicised, demanding a level of historical fluency and intellectual sophistication far beyond Coates’ pay grade. Prior to the ten days he spent in Israel and the West Bank last year, the author had never stepped foot in the Middle East. (He’s apparently never been to South Africa, either – curious, considering all that apartheid talk).
It was within this charged and chaotic context that Dokoupil did the unthinkable: he asked Coates to actually defend his views. Unthinkable not because the anchor’s questions – while pointed – were particularly out of line. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked in one instance. Harsher, sure, was his assertion that Coates’ book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” owing to its omission of any talk of Palestinian terror or accountability.
No, the entire Coates-Dokoupil debate boils down to optics, in other words race. Coates is black, Dokoupil is white – and within the racialised hierarchy that has legitimised Coates, any challenge, particularly around race or identity, cannot be tolerated. It’s the same system that prevents serious engagement with, say, Kamala Harris’ background – where she is described as African-American despite the fact that neither of her parents are. If a person of colour speaks about colour (any colour), they must always be right – facts and data points be damned (and I write this as a person of colour).
The only thing more odious than Ta-Nehisi Coates’ views on Israel is the cult of impunity that seems to surround him — and that cult appears to be winning. Late on Monday – on the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, no less – details leaked of Dokoupil’s rebuke. According to CBS, his interview did not “meet editorial standards.” By late Tuesday, there were reports of the anchor offering “regret” for causing friction within his workplace, though not for the interview itself.
Meanwhile, Coates has gone on Trevor Noah’s “What Now” podcast to extend his snide, self-aggrandising grievance campaign, suggesting that Dokoupil’s “commandeering” of their interview did a disservice to his pair of African-American co-hosts. Oh, and of course, CBS is apparently calling in a DEI consultant to help soothe triggered network nerves.
But the damage has been done — and it’s serious. The sheer extent of the uproar around Dokoupil’s interview with Coates reflects the worrisome double-standard to which Jews must now adhere throughout nearly every level of society. Back in 2020, Dokoupil’s African-American colleague Gayle King made tearful comments during a broadcast about George Floyd. She was bringing her “whole self” to her workplace – her outrage, emotion and pain – and was understandably supported.
But when a Jew like Dokoupil evokes a similar display, he is not only brow-beaten, but expected to apologise – a demand for contrition simply because he is valuing Jewish lives and challenging those who would forsake them.
Somehow Coates – who reiterated in his interview with Noah that he “been in this, in terms of the research and the writing, you know, over a year now” – has been framed as the rightful claimant of moral authority here. Never mind that Dokoupil (a Jewish convert) has made Judaism and Israel a core part of his identity for over a decade. As it affirms the silencing so common within wokeism, this baffling logic will deter other journalists from challenging even the most obvious biases, such as Coates’, for fear of a backlash and being caught in a race-storm.
Ultimately, the fact that Coates boasts so un-self-consciously about “being in” a conflict as fraught as Israel-Palestine for just a year not only makes clear that he has no right to be taken seriously on this subject, but that he has no real interest in it. Coates doesn’t appear to really care about Israel or Palestine – though he clearly cares about white folks and Jews. And from now on, that should be the only message spoken about The Message.
David Christopher Kaufman is a columnist for the New York Post
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