[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Every systemic change has a dividing line and that line arrived for CBS on September 30, 2024.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a black supremacist author, whose books had taken off in the era of BLM, had made the same post-BLM shift as many others of his ilk, and had come out with a book, ‘The Message’, denouncing Israel and Jews, he claimed that Jewish history was “an enormous con” and suggested that he might have joined in the murdering and raping on Oct 7.
No one in the media, which went on hailing Coates as an “acclaimed author” and “public intellectual” (and recently trotted him out to attack the deceased Charlie Kirk as a racist) thought that there was anything amiss here. Coates had enjoyed immunity for previously suggesting that 9/11 first responders were less than human so hardly anyone objected to this latest racist rant.
Like most big woke authors, Ta-Nehisi Coates was published by Random House, a front for the ex-Nazi German publisher, Bertelsmann, which had more than enough juice to get him on CBS Mornings for a chummy chat about his new book denouncing Jews (and as usual, America.)
Just in time for the week commemorating Oct 7.
But something went wrong.
Oprah pal Gayle King was ready to gush over yet another racist, but Coates encountered unexpectedly challenging questions from host Tony Dokoupil. Unlike Gayle and fellow host Nate Burleson, Dokoupil was there to fill the morning show’s ‘serious journalist’ quota. And while he was not born Jewish, he had converted as an adult, and proved far more willing to stand up to Coates than the ordinary Jewish liberal news talking head would have thought to do.
“Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada. . . the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?” Dokoupil asked. Coates didn’t have an answer. He was doing what he had done all his life, put out propaganda that guilty white liberals swooned at.
No one had ever asked him a question before.
Dokoupil’s Jewish conversion would inappropriately come up often in the post-interview media cancel culture session in which CNN, the New York Times and the usual suspects set out to destroy him for describing Coates as an “extremist” and asking him why he had made no mention of Islamic terrorism. CBS executives issued an apology to Coates for an employee having asked him tough questions and the media echo chamber mulled Dokoupil’s punishment.
But something went wrong again.
Among the handful of voices defending Dokoupil was Shari Redstone: the non-executive chairwoman of Paramount and Viacom, the media industry company that controlled CBS. The Redstone family was Jewish, but like most Jewish Hollywood and media executives, did not let that interfere with their role in companies that demonized Israel and defended terrorists.
It is hard to say why this moment, of all the others, the 60 Minutes hit pieces, the past lies and smears by the likes of Dan Rather, Bob Simon to the more obscure murderer’s row of their contemporary counterparts, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but everything had to start somewhere and maybe it started with a cozy morning show trying to run a softball interview with a defender of the mass murder of Jews to commemorate the Oct 7 massacre.
Maybe it started with CBS News personnel trying to lynch a journalist for asking a question.
The Free Press, a Substack publication started by Bari Weiss when she was pushed out of the New York Times for being a liberal rather than a leftist and pro-Israel rather than pro-Hamas,got hold of audio from a CBS News editorial meeting and condemned the news network for the disgraceful way it had brought on Coates and then gone after Dokoupil on Oct 7.
That was last year.
This year, Paramount bought The Free Press for $150 million and Bari Weiss is set to become the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. That’s the latest development from Shari Redstone’s sale of her company to David Ellison (son of Oracle boss Larry Ellison) and a process during which Colbert’s failing light night show was canceled and 60 Minutes reached a settlement with Trump.
The media fumed, denouncing the Ellisons as “Trump allies” and claiming that Redstone and CBS were appeasing ‘Hitler’. They might have saved their breath. Shari Redstone, once a member of the club in good standing, much like J.K. Rowling, doesn’t seem to give a damn anymore. After the Coates interview, Redstone reportedly had dinner with Dokoupil, overrode attempts to sanction him and urged CBS News brass to hire more conservatives.
At an Axios forum, she warned that “we have to go back to a place where facts are what the news is about and opinions are not facts.” Redstone suggested that Weiss was a “voice that would bring a different perspective” and urged “you’ve got to give your audience credit for being smart enough to hear different points of view and being able to narrow down on the facts.”
And, more publicly, she joined an Israeli production company after the sale, certainly not because she needs the money, has spoken passionately about Israel, and Paramount became the only company to publicly reject a boycott of the Jewish State proposed by radical celebs like Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo.
The Ellison/Paramount deal was a complicated one (as any big industry deal tends to be) and it may be overly simplistic to view the Coates interview as a game changer, but the New York Times profile ties its beginning to conservations that began after the Oct 7 attacks.
Redstone notably sounds different than she did in 2023, when her public remarks tended to be peppered with Biden era pieties about “protecting democracy”, and instead now speaks about the importance of facts and different points of view. Dumping Colbert was no doubt a financial decision, as Redstone says, but a willingness to breezily violate the sacred shibboleths of the leftist club no doubt made it easier. The 60 Minutes payment and a deal with a Trump ally might have also been far more repugnant before the Left showed what repugnant really meant.
If cheering on the mass murder of Jews on Oct 7 was the price of remaining in the club, the Jewish woman who controlled the destiny of CBS (not to mention Paramount) decided that it wasn’t worth it. There is a lesson here, both for the major Jewish industry figures who have remained silent (with the exception of Sherry Lansing) and for the media which has grown complacent about bosses who sign the checks and don’t interfere with their radical antics.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tried to wrest control of the Washington Post by, in part, trying to appoint UK conservative media vets to key positions. Ellison and Redstone signing off on Bari Weiss’s role at CBS News takes a similar approach.
There comes a time when even liberals, and even liberal Jews, the greatest doormats for every radical cause the world has ever seen, have had enough. CBS found that out the hard way.