Three years ago, Peter Beinart wrote that 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 (“We 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 for simply expressing basic humanity toward and solidarity with Palestinians. Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian pundits are profiled and interrogated before media appearances, if they’re even allowed on. Disgusting racism is aimed at a prominent Palestinian figure, and instead of getting sympathy and apologies, she is slandered and defamed. The sometimes deliberate murder 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 a 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 and officials in 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 by host Tony 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 Dokoupil’s “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 had 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 committed 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 of 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 to describe Palestinian suffering, ignore voices that support Palestinians, take less interest in Palestinian deaths and the crimes committed against them, and how those outlets leave their readers and viewers misinformed about the war. Or the numerous internal rebellions, leaks, and public criticisms of those outlets over their anti-Palestinian slant, lodged by journalism professors, reporters, and even their own staff, some of whom have resigned over the coverage.
Witness the New York Times’ former Jerusalem bureau chief, now the editor in chief of the Forward, openly endorse this double standard, saying 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 the 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 he 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.
