A character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises explains pithily how he went bankrupt: “Two ways: gradually, and then suddenly.” So, too, with the collapse of integrity at CBS News. The signs have been accumulating for decades. There was Dan Rather’s 2004 use of false documents to try to unseat George W. Bush during his reelection campaign. In 2012, 60 Minutes withheld the release of an interview with Barack Obama about the true source of the Benghazi terrorist attack. And in November 2023, Gayle King scolded the father of an Israeli child being held hostage by Hamas for not worrying enough about the suffering of “innocent” Palestinians.

In October, the decline suddenly accelerated. King’s colleague, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil asked some pointed questions of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book, The Message, offers his usual recipe of one-sided ahistorical declamations combined with a lot of moral posturing about race and (after a 10-day tour of the Middle East) some thin but entirely anti-Zionist gruel.

Dokoupil and Coates went back and forth for a few minutes in a lively but largely civil exchange, with Dokoupil noting, correctly, that the potted history Coates promotes would not be out of place in an “extremist’s backpack.” Anyone who watched would have noted the brief look of surprise on Coates’s face. He is clearly unaccustomed to anything other than fawning praise from mainstream-media interviewers and seemed momentarily caught off guard when asked to explain why he hadn’t bothered to mention in his book events such as the first and second intifada or the existence of terrorist groups like Hamas.

Although the exchange was a little more intense than the usual morning-show fare, there was nothing shocking about either man’s behavior. Coates later talked about the interview on a podcast with Trevor Noah, noting airily that Dokoupil’s co-host King had told him before the interview what questions she planned to ask him (she did not end up asking them on-air). And during an interview with one-time MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on Hasan’s new vanity platform, Zeteo, Coates said, “I was a little surprised, and then I realized what was going on, I was in a fight…. So it was right there, you know, as a pop quiz, but I had studied.” Later, when asked what he thought about U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, he said, with typical Coatesian glibness that mysteriously gets passed off as moral seriousness, “It’s kind of soul death for the struggle to just say, ‘Hey, we’re just going to go along with this.’”

Not going along with this: CBS News employees, who accused Dokoupil of being inappropriately aggressive with Coates and causing “trauma” among the staff. Audio leaked to the Free Press as well as to Puck media columnist Dylan Byers revealed that network executives Adrienne Roark and Wendy McMahon openly expressed their unhappiness with Dokoupil; they claimed his behavior during the interview failed to meet the network’s “editorial standards.”

Even this reprimand did not satisfy their underlings. During a second call the next day, as Puck reported, “some argued that Dokoupil’s editorializing put foreign correspondents in danger, while others complained that, by commandeering the interview, he had deprived his Black co-hosts, King and Burleson, from asking their own questions.” Others claimed that Dokoupil had been “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “Islamophobic” in his questioning of Coates.

Dokoupil was remanded to the custody of HR—namely, CBS News’s Race and Culture Unit—to be reminded (reeducated) about the important principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That unit, as Byers reported in Puck, “determined that while Dokoupil’s questions and intentions were acceptable, his tone was not.”  

The CBS meltdown is notable for a few reasons. First, we learned that CBS News personnel (with the rare exception of legal correspondent Jan Crawford, who defended Dokoupil’s tough questioning) are more conversant in the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the popular mental-health tropes of trauma and phobia, than they are in the common standards of professional journalism.

Second, despite some small signs of sanity in recent years, mainstream media clearly have not yet retreated from “peak woke” madness. It was new but unsurprising information that CBS News employs a Race and Culture Unit, distinct from the network’s traditional Standards and Practices division, with a mission as Orwellian as its name. The unit, created in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd four years ago, boasts that it has a “four-pronged role at CBS News and stations as a reviewer, an incubator, a producer and a library.”

Its “primary role” is the one it exercised in the Dokoupil–Coates fracas, and that was to “review”—which sounds innocuous but is in fact anything but. The unit functions “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone and intention.” This includes working “with CBS News network shows, the streaming network and stations by reviewing scripts and screeners as well as providing input in the ideation stage of story ideas.”

The Race and Culture Unit is itself part of a broader “Content for Change” program sponsored by CBS News’s corporate parent, Paramount Global. That program is described as “a global companywide, cross-brand initiative that seeks to use the power of the company’s content creation ecosystem to break down the narratives that enable intolerance, hurtful stereotypes, and systemic racism to exist and grow.”

If the Dokoupil incident is any guide, while CBS News is intent on preventing “systemic racism” from gaining purchase, it has no problem seeing journalistic standards wither. Amid the Dokoupil meltdown, Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes. A short social-media clip of the interview featured an answer by Harris to a question about Israel and Gaza. But when the full interview aired, a different answer by Harris was used—prompting questions about whether CBS had edited her remarks to make her response better. According to CBS’s own standards, “Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response.”

And yet, that appears to be what CBS has done—and it’s doubtful any of its staffers objected. The once-hallowed network is no longer known for its reporting but for its falsehoods, staff tantrums, selective editing, story suppression, tone-policing, and tape-splicing.

The chief of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, clearly is not with her own company’s program. She told reporters that Dokoupil “did a great job with that interview” and provided “a role model of what civil discourse is,” adding, “I was very proud of the work that he did.”

She could make changes at CBS News that reflect her views by disbanding the Race and Culture Unit and punishing the chiefs of the division for their surrender to the Maoist DEI regime that was determined to punish Dokoupil…but she just sold the place.

As for Coates, he told a podcast host that he might well have participated in October 7 himself had he been a resident of Gaza. So who’s to say he might not have murdered Jews and raped Jews and kidnapped Jews and burned Jews alive by the thousands?

That would seem to warrant a follow-up question, no?

Photo: Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images

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