A Jew at CBS
"Those 'unfriendly' questions from Tony Dokoupil made the anti-Israel journalists at CBS News go ballistic. How dare he challenge Coates? After all, Coates spent ten whole days in parts of Israel..."
By David Friend
Guest Commentary
If you are Jewish and you work at CBS News, you’d better keep your head down and your mouth shut. Oh, and mind your body language.
You are most definitely not part of the club that has been enabled and empowered by the inclusion infatuated CBS corporate leadership.
I’ve known this for quite a while, but this past week it burst onto everyone else’s radar like Iranian missiles launched at Israel.
CBS News honchos publicly humiliated Tony Dokoupil, the Jewish co-host of their important morning news program. You know, that’s the broadcast starring Oprah’s best friend, Gayle King.
Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News and her right hand woman, Adrienne Roark the news division’s editorial leader, raked Dokoupil over the coals about his interview with the proud, Israel-hating author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his one sided, anti-Israel new book, Messages.
They did it at the outset of Monday’s editorial conference call. Monday being October 7th, the one year anniversary of the Hamas slaughter of 1200 Israelis.
Great timing guys.
You may have read a lot about what happened, but I’m going to now tell you why it happened.
I worked at CBS for more than 14 years. I had two jobs. I was the news director at WCBS-TV in New York and I was also the Senior VP for Local News, consulting, advising and advocating for the twelve other local news departments that CBS owned around the nation.
The aforementioned Adrienne Roark, was the local news director in Dallas-Fort Worth, and I got to know her very well. I respected her news judgment and in fact I came to her defense when her boss wanted the news department to breach the Chinese wall between news and advertising.
I also experienced, first hand, how CBS became permeated with a powerful DEI clique led by CEO George Cheeks and his global head of inclusion, Marva Smalls.
In early 2021 I was publicly cancelled by CBS after scurrilous media articles that branded me as a racist, sexist and homophobe, with warmed-over accusations by a disgruntled former employee. I was suspended and CBS hired a big time New York City law firm to investigate the charges against me.
Even before the six-month probe was completed, which ultimately found there was no merit to the charges against me, even before I had a chance to tell my side of the story to the investigator, I was fired.
Why? Because George Cheeks, was hell bent on inculcating an inclusion culture at the company and I just didn’t fit.
For example, he happily obliged the screamers at the National Association of Black Journalists, whose asymmetrical standard of journalism was to call for my head before the investigation even began and before the truth prevailed.
So why have I told you all this about me? Because it aligns with what happened to Tony Dokoupil this past week.
Cheeks and crew have purposely and proudly created a company where key decisions on news and personnel are filtered through a racial lens. He’s been more or less able to keep that under wraps, but this past week it blew wide open when The Free Press published an audio recording of that Monday morning CBS News conference call.
On that mind-boggling, head-spinning, jaw-dropping call, McMahon and Roark, without mentioning Dokoupil by name, said the questioning of Coates was biased and opinionated, that it didn’t live up to the so-called objective standards of CBS News.
Dokoupil asked probing questions of Coates who is very open about his bias against Israel and his disdain for it being a homeland for the Jewish people.
Well, those unfriendly questions from Dokoupil made the anti-Israel journalists at CBS News go ballistic. How dare Dokoupil challenge Coates? After all, Coates spent ten whole days in parts of Israel and Judea/Samaria, and now understands everything about the issues. Don’t you know that the decades long Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a struggle between the Arabs, the people of color, being persecuted by the Israelis, the white oppressors? Aren’t you aware that the Black experience in Mississippi and Alabama is the same as the Palestinian Arab experience in Hebron and Haifa?
Those CBS staffers, so aggrieved and offended by Dokoupil’s questions, bombarded McMahon and Roark with emails and phone calls, backed with the full power of the CBS inclusion culture. I’m not surprised. That’s their modus operandi.
So what did McMahon and Roark do? They went to the standards and practices group and asked, did Dokoupil violate CBS News standards? Sounds like the right thing, no? Well, this is the same bunch that in August, sent an email to all CBS News employees telling them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about news” from Israel and Gaza.
Okay, that’s prudent. But the guy who wrote the email, the senior director of standards and practices added, “Do not refer to [Jerusalem] as being in Israel.”
He said, “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed.”
It’s not just the Trump administration that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, so did the US Congress in 1995. But even if you accept that east Jerusalem, conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War is in dispute, there’s no disputing that west Jerusalem, where the Israeli government resides, is geographically in Israel, within the 1967 borders. Period.
So that guy is hugely ignorant of the facts or hugely anti-Israel, or possibly both.
After their visit with the standards and practices crowd, McMahon and Roark went to the CBS News Race and Culture unit.
I was at CBS when this group was formed around four years ago at the height of the anger over the killing of George Floyd. It was George Cheeks’ brainchild.
CBS says, “The unit’s primary role is as a reviewer, working in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone and intention.” But what it also does is impugn the professionalism of the journalists at CBS, implying they are incapable of being fair and objective reporting on issues in the African American community.
Well, they reportedly didn’t like Dokoupil’s context, tone and body language. What’s the expression criminal defense attorneys use? A good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich? Well, the race and culture unit can find fault with any interview, if put to the task.
That was all the ammo McMahon and Roark needed to take Dokoupil to the woodshed.
But here’s the part where Dokoupil’s Jewishness comes into play. If they had gripes about his performance with Coates, or had other issues with him, they could have, should have, aired it out in private, with dignity. For sure that’s what they would have done with, let’s say Gayle King, who has expressed her opinions on hot news stories.
McMahon and Roark fed Dokoupil to the mob in a very public and very humiliating manner because they could, because Jews are not part of the shared journey that Marva Smalls and her inclusion department uses as its mantra.
Shari Redstone, the owner of CBS and Paramount, said McMahon and Roark made a “mistake” chastising Dokoupil and she thought he did “a great job with the interview.”
Good for her, but Redstone’s on her way out, having sold the company. It’s more important to pay attention to what George Cheeks had to say.
In a statement issued this past Wednesday, Cheeks said, “There has been a strong and growing discord within CBS News that needed to be addressed in an editorial meeting. This must lead to further substantive dialogue about perceptions of inconsistent treatment, implicit bias and the important standards our News division has in place to establish guardrails for fairness and objectivity.”
It doesn’t take much to read between his lines. Dokoupil the Jew, should have allowed Coates to speak his truth, his anti-Jewish and anti-Israel truth, without being challenged. Dokoupil should have just sat back and not done his job as a journalist.
Cheeks is also implying that at CBS, you are encouraged to bring your whole self to your job, unless you’re Jewish.
During that awful conference call on Monday, Adrienne Roark said, “This is about preserving the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News.”
No, Adrienne my old friend and colleague, it’s not about preserving the legacy of CBS News. It’s about deconstructing it to suit the loudest voices and their myopic views that have been empowered by the culture George Cheeks has incubated.
You condemned Dokoupil in public because you could, because he’s Jewish. You wouldn’t have done it to a person of color and you know it.
Publicly cancelling me was one thing. They now have anchors in their cross hairs. Now it’s fully out in the open. At CBS, anyone who is on the other side of the racial and cultural divide is at risk.
That’s why I say again to my Jewish former colleagues at CBS; keep your heads down, your mouths shut and watch your body language. Oh, and start looking for new jobs.
DAVID FRIEND is a former Senior Vice President at CBS News and is a strategic consultant to Chabad. This column first ran on David’s Substack platform: FriendWithoutBenefits
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