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TA-NEHISI COATES IS BUCKING THE MEDIA’S PALESTINE CONSENSUS  
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Branko Marcetic
October 9, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent grilling on Palestine
by CBS News’s Tony Dokoupil isn’t that it was rude. It’s that
Dokoupil’s questioning betrays a fundamental lack of concern for
Palestinians’ basic humanity, shared across mainstream me _

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

 

Three years ago, Peter Beinart wrote
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anti-Palestinian bigotry was so prevalent in establishment discourse
that it went by without notice, and that if it was ever actually named
and talked about, almost everyone with power and influence in American
society would be guilty of it. It’s like oxygen in the air, around
us all the time but something we almost never notice.

The past year of watching how media and politicians talk about the war
in Gaza has proven this true. Explicit calls for violence and
even literal genocide
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should kill them all,” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said earlier
this year) against Palestinians go by with no comment, let alone
condemnation. People lose jobs
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simply expressing basic humanity toward and solidarity with
Palestinians. Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian pundits are profiled
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interrogated before media appearances, if they’re even allowed
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Disgusting racism is aimed
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a prominent Palestinian figure, and instead of getting sympathy and
apologies, she is slandered and defamed
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The sometimes deliberate
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of Palestinian journalists with American weapons has been met with a
collective yawn from a US press that screamed bloody murder over
Donald Trump suspending
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CNN anchor’s press pass. No one has even thought about so much as
passing a resolution condemning Islamophobia in Congress.

We’ve also seen it in the mushrooming media furor over Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s recent book and accompanying press tour, specifically his
appearance on _CBS Mornings_ last week.

After a yearslong hiatus, Coates has expanded his criticism of
American racism with _The Message_, this time, in one of the book’s
essays, taking on what has been declared by both human rights groups
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Israel as the country’s system of apartheid. For many, the book and
its comparison of Israeli apartheid to American Jim Crow will be an
eye-opening exposure of how a friendly country — on which many
Americans are told is the only one like theirs in an alien and hostile
region — does not actually share their values.

This brings us to the current firestorm. Appearing on _CBS
Mornings_ to promote the book, Coates was challenged
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Dokoupil, who all but called him an “extremist,” charged that his
criticism of Israeli apartheid was presenting a one-sided view of the
conflict, and suggested at one point that Palestinians deserved their
repression.

Dokoupil asked him why he didn’t talk about “the first and the
second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings.” When Coates
described how he had more freedom to walk through the streets of
Hebron than his Palestinian guide “whose father, whose grandfather,
and grandmother was born in this town,” Dokoupil replied, “And why
is that?” He went on: “Why is there no agency in this book for the
Palestinians? . . . They exist in your narrative merely as victims of
the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture. .
. . What is their role in their lack of a Palestinian state?”

The segment, surprisingly, produced a flood of criticism and led to an
editorial review of the segment, with management deciding
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“tone” was at issue, while one of his colleagues defended him for
ensuring CBS didn’t air a “one-sided account.” Dokoupil has
now reportedly
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to meet with CBS’s “Race and Culture Unit,” which has dressed
him down for his “tone of voice, phrasing, and body language”
during the interview.

Leaks like this have turned the entire episode into a matter of media
debate, with some praising Dokoupil for asking challenging questions
and expressing outrage that he would be seemingly disciplined for
doing the job of a journalist. But Dokoupil’s offense was not that
he was asking tough questions — or at least, that’s not what
triggered the outcry over his interview of Coates. For many, it was
that Dokoupil seemed to not just blame Palestinians for being
discriminated against but suggested that it was the right thing to do.

“Why didn’t you explain that actually the Palestinians are the
ones responsible for their own apartheid is a weird argument,”
commented _Drop Site News_ reporter Ryan Grim.

While we shouldn’t encourage knee-jerk firings or even disciplining
of reporters for airing controversial views, in today’s media
climate, it’s hard to imagine a major network TV host saying this
kind of thing about any other group of people, let alone keeping their
job afterward.

Would Dokoupil say something like this to an author condemning
apartheid in South Africa, bringing up the violence
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by some black South Africans in the course of ending that system, and
the fact that some were officially designated terrorists? Would he ask
for both sides of the issue to be given equal weight and suggest the
author was biased against white South Africans?

After years of racist violence and being pushed off their land at the
hands of German colonists, indigenous Namibians attacked German
settlements at the turn of the century, killing 123 people. Would
Dokoupil point to this to suggest Africans _should_ have been kept
under the European thumb as they were because of the danger they pose,
let alone justify the Germans’ genocidal murder
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ninety thousand people that followed?

Of course not. Anyone in the twenty-first century can see these would
be clearly racist, odious arguments. No one would be caught dead
making them in public anymore — unless, of course, we’re talking
about Palestinians.

And this is the problem. Dokoupil and other establishment media
figures are so deeply swaddled in the anti-Palestinian bias suffusing
the news they read and watch, the opinions they hear, the
conversations in their social circles, that it’s likely many of them
genuinely _do not even realize _they’re saying something grossly
offensive.

Just look at the objective difference in the way the news outlets
consumed by members of the establishment use different language
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describe Palestinian suffering, ignore
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that support Palestinians, take less interest
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Palestinian deaths and the crimes committed
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them, and how those outlets leave their readers and
viewers misinformed
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the war. Or the numerous internal
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and public criticisms of those outlets over their anti-Palestinian
slant, lodged by journalism professors
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and even their own staff
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some of whom have resigned [[link removed]] over
the coverage.

Witness the _New York Times_’ former Jerusalem bureau chief, now
the editor in chief of the _Forward_, openly endorse
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that “there was a massacre on October 7, there were atrocities
committed, it was barbaric, I think those were appropriate words to
use,” but that she’s “not sure that ‘massacre,’
‘barbaric,’ and ‘atrocity’ are appropriate terms” for
Israel’s war. Read about how CNN’s international diplomatic
editor embarrassed
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network by uncritically broadcasting an Israeli military
spokesperson’s claim that a calendar in Arabic in a destroyed
hospital was a Hamas roster for guarding hostages, overruling warnings
by his Palestinian colleague because he simply could not imagine an
Israeli officer would lie.

This kind of thing can only happen in an environment where it’s not
only understood there are no professional consequences for this kind
of bias, but no social sanction for it, either.

What will come of the Coates brouhaha? That CBS is reportedly split
between those who think Dokoupil’s sin lies in his tone of voice and
body language, and those who think
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was boldly speaking truth to power, does not suggest anyone at the
network has actually learned anything from this, or that anything will
be done to remedy the anti-Palestinian bias that pervades mainstream
media. There was, after all, no actual issue with the way Dokoupil
said what he said, or how he was carrying himself when he said it. The
issue was _what_ he actually said.

Still, Coates’s interrogation and the controversy it has generated
may at least provide some small step forward to correcting this bias.
Coates should be applauded for his bravery in speaking out about this
subject and taking the risk of losing his establishment bona fides as
a result. And those in the media that will read and talk to him about
his book should ask themselves why doing so carries that risk at all.

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

* Ta-Nehisi Coates
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* Palestinians
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* Media Bias
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