No Questions Asked: Elevating Woke Over Journalism, CBS Looks Like Occupied Territory

In her 2021 book "Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy," journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon argued that arrogance and addiction to political fashion has tanked Americans' faith in the news media. There's reason to think she's right. Former National Public Radio editor Uri Berliner described NPR's "unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed" in an essay disclosing that NPR's editorial staff consisted of only Democrats. Berliner was promptly disciplined by his oh-so-devoted-to-the-First-Amendment bosses for writing the essay. Former New York Times journalists Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles and Adam Rubenstein have each described Times editors who demanded Hafez al-Assad-like obeisance to certain Political Truths Of The Left and who brooked little departure from them.

A 2022 Knight/Gallup survey found that only 26% of Americans view the news media favorably; 53% view it unfavorably. A Gallup poll taken last year found that 29% of Americans trusted the media "not very much." Another 39% don't trust it at all.

Recently, CBS, the network of journalistic icons Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, made itself a laughingstock, dragging its profession along with it, reprimanding one of its journalists for having had the nerve to calmly, civilly ask a prominent author a couple of mildly probing questions about the new book he was promoting as part of his national publicity tour. The culprit was co-host of "CBS Mornings" Tony Dokoupil, and the poor victim was prize-winning author and literary rock star Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates has garnered acclaim writing about racism in America, and has made no bones about his rage at this country, a rage that, passionate and vivid, has sometimes found expression in controversial ways. Al-Qaeda's attack on Sept. 11, 2001, which murdered about 3,000 innocents of every race, background and socioeconomic class, left him somewhere between agnostic and satisfied. "Everyone knew someone who was missing," he wrote about the demolished twin towers. "But looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. In the days after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen, the overwrought slogans. Damn it all. They were not human to me."

It emerges that the innocents murdered on 9/11 were not the only ones not human to Coates, because the 1,200 innocents slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7 are included among those about whom Coates could not give the proverbial fig. That is certainly the message of Coates' new book, "The Message," in which he devotes a special section to the by-now familiar "Israel-as-white-supremacist-colonialist-imperialist-expansionist-genocidal-Satan" refrain, recited by the far left with robotic mindlessness.

But it is Coates' shtick, and he is entitled to it. Apparently, however, he should not be required to answer questions about it by interviewers. Or so Coates and his supporters believe, and they prevailed upon CBS to discipline Dokoupil, forcing him to express his "regret" for gently, respectfully asking Coates about his views. "When I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim," Dokoupil began gingerly, "the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist. I found myself wondering, why does Ta-Nehisi Coates ... leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? ... Is it because you don't believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?"

Fair questions, even obvious ones. But Lord Coates found it outrageous that he could be asked them, an affront to his stature. Whereupon CBS News President Wendy McMahon announced Dokoupil had violated CBS' "standards."

What standards? Asking authors hawking books to explain why they had written what they had written? Only asking those on news shows what they would prefer to be asked?

Evidently, if a guest is sufficiently popular among The Right Set, asking them real questions is off limits. That kind of "journalism" really does undermine democracy. Murrow and Cronkite must be spinning in their graves.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.