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(Daily Caller) CBS News will bring in diversity consultant Dr. Donald Grant after employees voiced competing concerns regarding the network’s handling of an interview with a pro-Palestinian activist, according to Puck News’ Dylan Byers.
CBS will deploy Grant, a self-styled “‘mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer,’” after they declared that an interview between correspondent Tony Dokoupil and author Ta-Nehisi Coates did “not meet editorial standards for impartiality,” Byers reported.
Grant, whose website lists a client base ranging from the University of Buffalo Medical School to the Los Angeles Dodgers, has a checkered social media history, according to users on X.
One post Grant made on Instagram shows prominent black conservatives Candace Owens and Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s faces photoshopped onto a copy of the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a classic Harriet Beecher Stowe novel about slavery.
Grant shared a number of other openly partisan, anti-Trump images on his Instagram as well.
CBS is bringing him in to mediate an in-house kerfuffle over the organization’s accusation that their own reporter failed to be impartial, according to Byers.
CBS executives Wendy McMahon & Adrienne Roark issued their decree condemning a Sept. 30 interview with Coates, which Dokupil co-chaired with CBS colleagues Nate Burleson and Gayle King, though they refused to elaborate how or why, the journalist reported.
Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent, reportedly criticized the decision, noting that Dokoupil was simply pushing back on Coates, a vocal backer of Palestine who describes Israel as a practitioner of apartheid in his new book.
“I don’t even understand how Tony’s interview failed to meet our editorial standards,” Crawford said, according to Byers.
Crawford: “I don’t even understand how Tony’s interview failed to meet our editorial standards… I thought our commitment was to truth. When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of very complex situation—which Coates himself acknowledges that he has—it’s my…
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) October 7, 2024
“I thought our commitment was to truth. When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of very complex situation—which Coates himself acknowledges that he has—it’s my understanding that as a journalist we are obligated to challenge that worldview, so that our viewers can have access to the truth and can have a more balanced account,” Crawford said, the journalist wrote.
“And that is what Tony did,” she continued.
“He challenged Coates’ one-sided worldview, Coates got to respond. It was civil … I don’t see how we can say that it failed to meet our editorial standards … Tony prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network about a deeply complex situation that completely was devoid of history or fact. As journalists, that’s what we have an obligation to do,” Crawford added, Byers posted.
During the interview, Dokupil pushed back on Coates’ book, which he described as “an effort to topple the whole building” of Israel.
“I have to say when I when I read the book I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil remarked.
“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? 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 the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?” Dokoupil asked
“Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?” he asked.
Coates countered Dokoupil, saying that the perspective he offered was overrepresented and that Coates’ intention was to voice a less-platformed view, conceding his book “is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”
Dokoupil pushed back.
“But if you were to read this book, you would be left wondering ‘Why does any of Israel exist? What a horrific place committing horrific acts on a daily basis.’ So I think the question is central and key, if Israel has a right to exist.”
Dokoupil’s ex-wife and two children live in Israel, he revealed in 2023.
The Daily Caller reached out to Dokoupil, Crawford, McMahon, Roark and CBS News for clarity, but did not hear back by time of publication.
