Stand Up to the Cancel Mob -- Or Stop Calling Yourselves Journalists

A storm brewing at CBS News.

With the presidential campaign down to its final few weeks and hurricanes battering Florida and beyond, you may have missed the news about another storm brewing — this one at CBS News.

Apparently, some folks at CBS News have found CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil guilty … of committing journalism.

He was interviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message, which is highly critical of Israel, when Dokoupil asked a few tough questions:

“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? Why not detail anything of the first and the second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don`t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”

“There is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates replied. 

I’ve been around journalism a long time — 28 years at CBS News alone — and Dokoupil’s questions strike me as perfectly legitimate. But not everyone at CBS News agrees.

What followed was a staff conference call led by two CBS News executives who had received complaints from some young staffers.

News President Wendy McMahon said that Dokoupil’s questions were not in line with CBS News’ “editorial standards.” Adrienne Roark, another executive, said,  “There are times we fail our audiences and each other. We’re in one of those times right now, and it’s been growing. And we’re at a tipping point.”

Rourke also said that, CBS News will still report objectively and ask tough questions but, “we have to check our bias and opinions at the door.”

According to the New York Post, Dokoupil told colleagues that he “regretted” the position he had put them in.

“What position is that exactly? A proximity to real journalism?” — is what Matthew Hennessy in the Wall Street Journal wanted to know.

If this sounds familiar — young staffers revolting against old school journalism — it’s because it is familiar. From Hennessey’s column:

“Young staffers at brand-name outlets have hooted at veteran colleagues for their commitment to the old-fashioned values of objectivity and neutrality. Many Gen Z and millennial reporters don’t think that’s what journalism is supposed to be. They don’t want to report on the world. They want to change it.”

He’s right, of course. But as bad as that is, what’s worse is that the supposed grownups often cave. They did at the New York Times when the opinion page editor had the gall to publish an op-ed from a conservative U.S. senator who expressed a view the woke crowd didn’t like. The woke crowd won; the editor lost his job. And at CBS News, top brass isn’t showing much courage either.

From Matthew Hennessey:

“The bad news is, too many executives are cowed by these upstarts, who are motivated by a quasireligious fervor and convinced they are on the right side of history. They are expert at stoking outrage on social media and love nothing more than claiming a scalp. Senior editors at many outlets live in fear of their own staff.

“While Ms. Roark paid lip service to CBS News’s ‘editorial standards,’ she and Ms. McMahon clearly felt it necessary to massage the wounded woke sensibilities of certain employees by blaming Mr. Dokoupil, who either didn’t get or didn’t read the memo: The Tiffany Network doesn’t do journalism anymore, only groupthink.”

At least one CBS News journalist showed some common sense. Washington correspondent Jan Crawford weighed in on the conference call, saying:

“It sounds like we’re calling out one of our anchors in a somewhat public setting on this call for failing to meet editorial standards for – I’m not even sure what. I don’t understand how Tony’s interview or any of the comments he’s made with anchors, failed to, you know, meet our editorial standards that obviously go back to the days of Murrow and Cronkite, which, of course. I thought our commitment was to truth. And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And that is what Tony did. He challenged Coates' one-sided worldview, Coates got to respond. It was civil … Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network about a deeply complex situation that completely was devoid of history or fact.”

Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS parent Paramount Global, who speaks out against antisemitism, also weighed in. She reportedly told CBS executives that she didn’t believe the interview violated editorial standards and that, according to one news report, “told people that it was insensitive for CBS News to address the matter on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.”

In 1996, when I was a correspondent at CBS News, I reached a breaking point with my tolerance over liberal bias at CBS and more importantly, in mainstream journalism generally.  I wrote an op-ed about it in the WSJ — and it touched off the media version of World War III.

Liberals were outraged. I was called a traitor. Too bad, I figured, someone had to finally say it from inside the tent, and if I was the guy, so be it.

Now we have another storm, and while history may not repeat itself, as the saying goes, it rhymes. Because now, with the current controversy over what constitutes real journalism at CBS and beyond, liberals are again outraged. We didn’t call them “woke” back then and the mob back then didn’t cancel me — and I hope, hard as they may try, they don’t hurt Tony Dokoupil (more than they already have).

But, as Matthew Hennessy, so clearly puts it in his take on the brouhaha not only at CBS, but in the world of journalism at large:

“Those in positions of power in the American media should know better than to kowtow to the cancel mob. If they won’t stand up, they should stop calling themselves journalists.”