CBS “News”: Ta-Nehisi Coates must get the kid-glove treatment
Ta-Nehisi Coates is someone I’ve written about several times before. I refer you to the first three posts on the list that can be found here. In my opinion, his works are vile – and all the more vile because he cloaks his hatred in a smoothly literary style.
His latest work has focused his bile on Israel and Jews. He has accomplished the astounding feat of writing on the subject as though he just dropped in from Mars, because he omits any mention of Hamas, 10/7, or Arab terrorism from his book. Here’s a review by Coleman Hughes:
And here’s another review, if you prefer reading to watching a fairly lengthy video. An excerpt:
Though a talented writer who styles himself as a journalist, Coates mostly pens words about himself and his personal impressions of the world without bothering much with grounding his work in facts or trying to place his ideas in a context that tells more than one narrow side of a story. Indeed, he is someone who thinks writers and journalists should not be seeking to tell both sides of complex stories, believing that they should boil everything down to conform to simplistic left-wing conclusions, whether accurate or not. That is exactly how toxic ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality work. …
[Coates’] entire personal experience on this topic [of Israel and Palestine] consists of a single 10-day trip to “Palestine” from which he extrapolated not just 150 pages of text but a series of damning conclusions.
For Coates, everything he saw in “Palestine”—whether on Palestinian-guided tours of places like Hebron or even time spent in Haifa or Tel Aviv—was a reflection of the historical American experience of “Jim Crow” discrimination. Woke ideologues falsely analogize the Palestinian war to destroy Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. In this way, Coates superimposes his own beliefs about an America that is an irredeemably racist nation onto the complex conflict between Jews and Arabs over possession of the land of Israel. The fact that the conflict isn’t racial doesn’t matter because to speak of this reality would prevent him from painting a largely fictional picture of a Jewish state he would like to see destroyed.
Coates dismisses Zionism as mere colonialism. He does this in part by misconstruing the writing of Zionist founding fathers who used the word in a very different way than he does or by simply falsely claiming that Israel’s birth was somehow the work of imperialism rather than by an act of what can only be fairly described as decolonization. …
Jewish rights and Jewish history aren’t so much misinterpreted as denied altogether. …
Those Israelis who are not identifiably “white”—whether they are part of the Mizrachi majority, meaning from other countries in the Mediterranean or Arab Mideast, or Ethiopians—are merely the moral equivalent of blacks who served the Confederacy or Jim Crow governments with no legitimacy as part of a people returned to their homeland.
Equally telling is his view that the Palestinians, who play the role of oppressed former slaves in his personal psychodrama version of the Middle East, have no agency, and their actions don’t matter.
Hard as it may be to imagine, his book never mentions terrorism, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, the numerous rejections of peace offers and independence by the Palestinians. Hamas and Oct. 7 rate not a single mention anywhere in his text. It is not so much an example of bad reporting or history as a parody of a book about a complicated topic.
Actually, it’s an example of vicious Jew-hating propaganda, unashamed and unapologetic. And I believe Coates is such a praised literary lion that his book will influence a great many people who are ignorant of the actual history.
Meanwhile, the interview at CBS – in which one reporter actually challenged Coates on his garbage – has had some very instructive fallout. The reporter has gotten into a heap of trouble at CBS. Some excerpts:
Interviewer Dokoupil [of CBS] had the gall to question Nahesi-Coates about his anti-Israel comments.
“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 second intifada. . . the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”
This, as Puck News’ Dylan Byers reported on X, was when things started to go wrong for Dokoupil. According to Byers:
“CBS NEWS has been roiling after a CBS Mornings interview in which anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed Ta-Nehisi Coates over his pro-Palestinian framing of Israel-Palestine conflict. The interview was celebrated by many—’tense and substantive,’ per WaPo—but angered some at CBS who felt Dokoupil brought his own bias.”
Byers then noted that CBS News honchos Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark, at a Monday morning meeting, “told staff that the interview did not meet editorial standards for impartiality, though they declined to elaborate on how or why. When they tried to move on, CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford criticized the leaders for their decision, saying the following…”
Much much more at the link.
Dokoupil must have thought he was interviewing a Republican. He forgot the cardinal rule that Coates – a much-feted literary lion who is black, leftist, and a mouthpiece for blaming whites and now Jews for whatever is wrong with the world – cannot be challenged like that.
So now we have this sad result. It’s hard to summarize, but the gist of it is that Dokoupil was made to apologize in a big struggle session, and it has also been revealed that CBS vetted its questions with Coates and Dokoupil failed to check everything out with him. This of course is not journalism. But CBS doesn’t do journalism. An excerpt:
But Coates also revealed a detail that caught our eye. As he was praising King [who also interviewed him] as a “great journalist and a great interviewer,” he said that “Gayle came behind the stage before we went [on] and she had gone through the book, and I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I’m gonna ask you about this. I’m gonna ask you about that.’?”
So let’s get this straight: One journalist is raked over the coals for asking tough questions, while another journalist—if Coates’s recollection is correct—previews her questions and faces no repercussions. (King did not respond to a request for comment.)
Which poses a few questions. Chief among them: Are there different rules for different journalists at CBS?
A former CBS journalist told The Free Press that “If she was showing him specific lines of questioning in advance, that would violate journalistic standards. Now are they going to investigate her and say that what she did was not in keeping with CBS standards? I suspect not.”
One last thing: Let’s just say we have pattern recognition around stories like these. So when two sources at CBS told The Free Press that this whole dustup involved the network’s “Race and Culture Unit,” we weren’t shocked.
According to the company’s website, this unit works “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone, and intention.” It was formed in the summer of 2020. “We must always be aware of how race and culture impacts our journalism—and, in terms of the future of CBS News, this unit will be as important as Standards and Practices,” a CBS executive said at the time.
Journalism? I think not. Or rather, it’s what journalism (I prefer the term “reporting”) has morphed into these days.
On Coates
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https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-ta-nehisi-coates-hates-israel/
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On Coates
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https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/on-maya-angelou-ta-nehisi-coates-the-whining-of-pampered-pets/
Is Ta-nesihi Coates aware of the 1929 Hebron Massacre? Or, that after 1939, no Jews remained in Hebron. No ethnic cleansing there? Ta-Neshi Coates thinks not.
I am a Coates on my mother’s side.
My family name has been besmirched!
CBS is a subsidiary of Paramount, which is a public corporation. It seems very likely that the financial value of the CBS asset is being reduced by this behavior. If majority shareholder Shari Redstone doesn’t care, the company still has an obligation to their other shareholders.
@ Neo – it’s not “reporting” either — it’s propaganda all the way down.
The legacy media are Democrat propaganda outlets, with an occasional dollop of news.
When this wretched piece of a so-called writer going by that name first floated into my ken, I thought it was female, and I read the name as Ta-Hissy-Fit.
I’m told now that it’s “Tennessee” but with a ghetto spelling and extraneous punctuation.
Thought it was “Tonna-Hissy”, Sgt. Mom.
Coates is no “literary lion”. He is a black leftist who trades on his blackness, which makes him uncorrectible. He will climb over dead black bodies, do anything, just to reach the top. He is a male prostitute, in effect.
New Yorker has a rather ridiculous article about Coates’ new book, which they link and promote at X with:
“In his new book, Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses his version of moral clarity: Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians.”
@WindDustStars responds:
“What a bloated and self-indulgent essay. The author is irritatingly pretentious. And of course, Coates is simplistic and wrong in his racialized understanding of Palestine’s situation.
https://x.com/WindDustStars/status/1842234809248034960
New Yorker has a rather ridiculous article about Coates’ new book…
David+Foster:
I find Coates a bad writer and a terrible moral influence. But much of my anger towards him is really on the craven obsequiousness by “The New Yorker” and such intellectuals.
I’ve loved the “The New Yorker” in my time and the high standard of writing, humor, and even critical thinking it once embodied.
I don’t recognize its Stalinoid inheritors.
Today my conservative café friend brought in his copy of “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (1970) by Tom Wolfe. It wasn’t news to me.
It is two separate essays. “Radical Chic” is about a gathering of the Beautiful People at Leonard Bernstein’s chic NYC apartment to meet the Black Panthers. This turns into the standard progressive suckupathon, which Wolfe delighted in delineating, to dangerous radicals whom the Beautiful People barely understand while the Panthers are somewhat baffled as to how to take advantage of such naïveté.
The article is over 50 years old but is practically ripped from the pages of today’s “New Yorker.”
Every time I reread Radical Chic, it seems as if if happened yesterday.
That lack of context is also the approach of Atef Abu Saif’s book on the Gaza war: Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide.Here is his entry for October 7.
The “first two victims of this war” are Gazans, not Israeli. All is on what is going on in Gaza. We got bombed on…The book continues in a similar vein. Suddenly the Israelis attacked….
I am reminded of Louse Steinman’s visit to the Hiroshima museum in The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.
Gazans got killed by Israelis. No mention of why Israeli soldiers entered Gaza, which Israel had voluntarily left eighteen years ago. Gazans as victims, not as agents. Recall that Hamas said after October 7 that this was just the beginning.
The 1988 Hamas charter mentions the Islamic conquest of ” Palestine”.
The long view of history is that Israel exist in a part of the world that has been gradually purged , over the centuries, of most non Muslims, in relative and even literal numbers.
Lebanese Christians have a power sharing agreement with the Muslims, but the Christians are loosing the demographics race in Lebanon.
A little more that a hundred years ago, there were still millions of Christians in what is now Turkey. Where did they all go?
Seventy five years ago or so there were still many Hindus in what is now Pakistan. Where did they all go?
Ditto black African villages that are now being emptied of non Muslims . Where are the black American activist?
Cicero:
The phrase “literary lion” refers to how Coates has been treated by the literary establishment, not anything else about him. It certainly has nothing to do with my opinion of his work. He has so far received the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was the 2012–2014 MLK visiting scholar for writing at MIT, was at NYU’s Journalism Institute as a Distinguished Writer in Residence, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, and won the coveted MacArthur Prize. That’s not even an inclusive list of his literary awards; see this list under “Awards.”
Again, Coates career is a function of the emotions-based pathology of a segment of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie – primarily that segment which works in education and media. Ditto Tim Wise / Robin diAngelo / Ibram Henry Rogers. You always have clowns in this world. Here’s a question that really applies over the last 60-odd years: why are the clowns in charge of anything?
Perhaps Coats would do better going door to door in Jewish neighborhoods to discuss his views. Perhaps not. Especially in red states.