Polarization and Journalism

Journalists should be reporting on it, not practicing it

As I write this, a second once-in-a-hundred-years hurricane has barreled through Florida in less than 10 days, Vice President Kamala Harris went on “The View” this week to say she wants to “turn the page” on an administration in which she agreed with every single decision, and the lowly Vanderbilt Commodores have beaten the number one team in the country, the Alabama Crimson Tide. Oh, and Donald Trump still enjoys overwhelming support among evangelical voters.

Nothing makes sense anymore.

Add this to the list of things that have me scratching a bald spot on my head: the interview last Monday morning on CBS with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, “The Message.” It was a doozy of a head-scratcher in which journalistic integrity was sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. Walter Conkrite may not have done a full rotation, but he’s almost certainly shaking a finger in admonishment.

Coates is a writer who started out at the Washington City Paper in the 1990s while he was at Howard University, but he made his mark when he was at The Atlantic, which he joined as a blogger and reporter in 2008. There, he wrote a seminal piece, “The Case for Reparations,” which nearly crashed the magazine’s servers. He went on to write a successful and widely respected book on America’s racial history, “Between the World and Me.” On the issue of race and culture, he is one of our brightest public intellectuals.

His new book, “The Message,” is a meditation on racism and oppression told from ground level — trips that included a pilgrimage to Africa (Senegal), Columbia, S.C. (where one of his books was almost banned), and the Middle East, where he probed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He’s promoting it with a book tour, which landed him on “CBS Mornings” for an interview with Gayle King and co-anchors Tony Dokoupil Nate Burleson.

Barely a minute into the interview, Dokoupil took the steering wheel.

“I have to say,” Dokoupil began, “when I read your book, I imagined if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, and the cover off the book and the publishing house goes away, the content of that section (on Israel and Palestine) would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”

You could almost hear the collective gasp on the set.

“So, 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?” Dokoupil continued. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it, why leave out that Israel deals with terrorist groups that want to eliminate it . . . Is it because that you just believe that Israel in any condition has no right to exist?”

“Well, I would say that the perspective you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates replied, before going on to say that he is against oppression in any form, regardless of context.

Dokoupil did what any good journalist should do. He challenged conventional thinking. In this case, it was the dogma of the left that the state of Israel is an oppressive ethnocracy denying Palestinians their right to statehood and self-determination through a brutal regime of apartheid and illegal expansion. Even a casual student of history knows that there is much more complexity and nuance involved in the Israel-Palestinian conflict (for a good synopsis, read Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land: The Promise and Tragedy of Israel”).

Several days later, the sand hit the fan.

At a weekly meeting of the CBS editorial staff, news brass apologized to the staff for Dokoupil’s performance, saying it had “fallen short” of editorial standards and that he should have “checked his bias” at the door. Dokoupil’s interview was reviewed by the network’s Race and Culture Unit, which had concerns with his tone and “body language.” He’s now been branded by the culture police and where his career goes from here is anybody’s guess.

The story leaked, of course, and The Free Press published audio of the staff meeting. That was followed by another meeting of the news staff that included shouting and tears. Even in newsrooms today, where objectivity and rigor should be the norm, polarization has corrupted the culture.

Journalism is not about dogma. Its job is to raise the flap on the tent and let us see inside. Why do people do what they do? What were they thinking when they did it? What are the wider impacts of an action or thought? These are the hard questions that journalism should ask. These are the questions that Dokoupil was asking. Why did you write your book one way and not another, he asked Coates. As a self-proclaimed reporter, why did you not represent the other side of the story?

The irony of Dokoupil’s trip to the woodshed is this — his question, which was provocative and probing, actually elicited a passionate, complex and interesting response from Coates and made for great TV. It led to such an energetic discussion that it blocked out any opportunity that Gayle King and Nate Burleson might have had for follow-up questions (which may have been his unspoken sin; you step in front of Gayle and a microphone at your own peril).

If we are to move beyond polarization in this country, it will require courageous, civil conversations like this, not muzzles for “failing” editorial standards. It requires courage to acknowledge countervailing facts and even more courage to acknowledge countervailing opinions. This is the essence of dialogue, and this was at the heart of the conversation between Coates and Dokoupil on CBS. To their credit, the conversation ended with Dokoupil saying Coates is “still invited to high holidays, I’ll see you at the shul,” with Coates laughing in reply. The editorial brass at CBS should have claimed this as the singular, probing moment that it was instead of admonishing an intrepid journalist for asking a hard question. Shame on them.