• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 11, 2024

“CBS Mornings” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil did a great job asking questions and author Ta-Nehisi Coates did a masterful job answering them in their interview September 30 on the CBS morning show.

It was a great interview and both should be congratulated. Dokoupil asked his questions pointedly and perfectly, and Coates answered them with evident relish and enthusiasm.

The author didn’t seem to mind at all when Dokoupil asked about aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, in Dokoupil’s opinion, were missing from Coates’ new book “The Message.”

Coates, 49, came on the show to promote the book. The interview likely helped it sell, aided greatly by the classy way the author parried the anchorman’s questions.

So, all’s well, right? Well, no. Someone inside CBS complained afterward that something was unfair about the questions Dokoupil asked Coates. 

According to reports, CBS News brass flew into crisis mode when some staffers made the bosses know they were unhappy with the interview because, the reports say, they felt it was biased in favor of Israel in the current war with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Management held staff meetings to quell the “uproar,” and even reportedly admonished Dokoupil, 43, for essentially doing his job. 

Since newsrooms are sieves, details of all of it were leaked to other media all over the place. 

Thus, Dokoupil, whose questions did not seem to bother the only person whose opinion matters -- Coates himself -- has now been embarrassed publicly and his experience and obvious interviewing skill called into question.

How much do you want to bet he will eventually be gone? It might take weeks or months, but these things have a way of sticking.

And yet he did nothing wrong. It is obvious when interview subjects object to questions. They glower and start fidgeting in their chairs.

Sometimes they raise the volume of the discussion and turn it into an argument. In rare instances, they rise out of their seats, unclip their lavalier mics and stalk out.

Coates showed no signs of any of this. In fact, at the end of this adult conversation about the age-old conflict between the Jewish State and its majority-Muslim neighbors, the two had a friendly parting.

You're still invited to the High Holidays. I'll see you at the shul!" said Doukopil, who is Jewish. In response Coates laughed heartily.

The segment that has now launched a thousand stories and commentaries was six minutes and 50 seconds long. 

As seen in the screenshot above, all three of the “CBS Mornings” co-anchors -- Dokoupil, Gayle King and Nate Burleson -- tripled up to interview the author instead of just one of them. 

I have no idea whether this is standard practice at the CBS morning show, but one interviewer would have sufficed, preferably Dokoupil.

By my calculations, Dokoupil’s questions and Coates’ answers continued uninterrupted for at least five minutes of the 6:50 segment.

Burleson asked the first question, but after that it was all Dokoupil until almost the very end. That’s when King got in a question with something like 20 seconds to spare.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that that became a problem too after the show -- namely, that King, the star of the show, was reduced to a nonentity for virtually the entire segment and she may have made her displeasure known later.

Burleson started it off with a summary of what “The Message” is all about and, in the process, gave some context to the portion about the Middle East.

“Our next guest is the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Burleson said. 

“His new book, ‘The Message,’ is a trio of interconnected essays that examine how the stories we tell or avoid telling can shape and even distort our reality. 

“In the book, Coates reflects on his emotional first trip to Africa to visit Dakar, Senegal. Then he takes readers to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on an attempted banning of one his books on race. And finally, Coates travels to the Middle East to witness the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first hand.”

Burleson then asked the first question. “You say that this book is written specifically for writers, stating that the task for young writers should be nothing less than changing the world. Why do you feel like writers should bear that responsibility?”

“Saving the world, just to be really specific,” Coates answered amiably. “Writing is how we interpret so much of everything that is around us,” he said. “[Writers] actually shape lives by writing and the stories we tell.”

A millisecond after Coates completed this answer, Dokoupil jumped in and held the stage for the next five minutes.

“Ta-Nehisi, I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book, the largest section of the book, and I have to say when I read the book, I imagined if I took your name out of it, and took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.

“So,” Dokoupil continued, “then I found myself wondering why does Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? 

“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want it eliminated? Why leave out that Israel deals with Arab groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada, the café 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?”

They were tough words and tough questions, but aren’t interviews on hot-button current affairs supposed to be tough?

If Coates thought the questions were unfair, then he gave no sign of it. He simply answered them.

“Well, I would say of the perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates said. 

“I am most concerned always with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk,” he said. “I have asked repeatedly in my interviews whether there is a single network, mainstream [news] organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world.”

“I’ve been a reporter for 20 years. The reporters who think more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out,” he continued.

“But what I saw in Palestine, what I saw in the West Bank, what I saw in Haifa in Israel, what I saw in the South Hebron hills, those were the stories that I have not heard, and those were the stories I was most occupied with. I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

This is how the interview went for an estimated five minutes and nobody got hurt -- nobody, that is, except a group of as-yet unidentified CBS News staffers (how many? Four? Eleven? Sixteen?) who went crying to management.

Grizzled journalist alert: Every time I read about one of these incidents where some newsroom staff members -- such as happened at The New York Times and NBC News if memory serves -- pitch a fit over the practices of the companies that pay them, I sit in wonder at today’s newsrooms.

In my experience, newsrooms were never democracies. You did what you were told. You weren’t allowed to stage rebellions. 

Nor would you have had any expectation that higher-up editors would heed or even care about your opinions if they ran counter to theirs. 

You would more expect to be demoted or fired for insubordination. I sometimes wonder why the top brass at places like CBS News even care what a bunch of disgruntled staffers say.