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In a stark departure from its own corporate precedent and the usual circle-the-wagons approach of news divisions in crisis, top execs at CBS News parent Paramount Global have publicly disagreed this week.
At the center of the situation was an interview last week with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS Mornings. While co-hosts Gayle King, Nate Burleson and Tony Dokoupil all sat in on the chat, Dokoupil drew criticism for dominating and pressing Coates on the section of his book, The Message, that criticizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Dokoupil, who is Jewish, challenged Coates on whether he believed the state of Israel had a right to exist.
CBS News brass addressed the matter during a staff call Monday featuring Adrienne Roark, the president of editorial and newsgathering, and Wendy McMahon, president of CBS News and Stations. They told employees that Dokoupil’s questioning did not meet the news division’s “editorial standards.”
Paramount Chair Shari Redstone, appearing Wednesday at Advertising Week in New York, called it a “mistake” for CBS News to publicly rebuke Dokoupil. She described the interview as a “model” of “civil discourse.”
George Cheeks, who oversees CBS as one of Paramount’s three Co-CEOs, issued a statement later Wednesday defending McMahon and CBS News leadership. He vowed to encourage “further substantive dialogue about perceptions of inconsistent treatment, implicit bias and the important standards our News division has in place to establish guardrails for fairness and objectivity.”
Sources tell Deadline that Redstone and Cheeks speak regularly. Along with Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins, Cheeks got a major vote of confidence from Redstone just a few months ago when she installed him in the Office of the CEO when Bob Bakish was ousted. Prior to her Ad Week appearance, Redstone called Cheeks to voice her personal opinion and say that she was unhappy about how the situation had been handled. She also offered a heads-up that she was going to address the matter publicly, and he also advised her of his plan to publicly back CBS News.
Redstone, who has guided Paramount as its majority shareholder and chair over the past several years, has talked frequently about the rise of anti-Semitism and her commitment to trying to use her position to combat it.
The discord spilled out in the open following a period of upheaval for everyone working at CBS News and Paramount Global, which is poised to be sold to Skydance Media in a deal slated to close in the first half of 2025. The newsroom went through a round of layoffs last month that saw such personalities as Jeff Glor, co-host of CBS Mornings on the weekend, exit, part of Paramount’s trimming of 15% of its U.S. staff.
During the summer, Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews announced that she was stepping down as president of CBS News, a position she held for less than a year. That was followed by a restructuring of the news leadership team, with Adrienne Roark named to the new position of president of editorial and newsgathering, reporting to Wendy McMahon.
Meanwhile, Norah O’Donnell, who has anchored CBS Evening News for the past five years, is stepping down after the election, with John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois co-anchoring a revamped broadcast overseen by Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes. That change drew criticism from one of O’Donnell’s predecessors, Katie Couric, who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times criticizing the fact that the change will mean that none of the major broadcast evening news anchors will be women, although she did acknowledge that they were in leadership roles.
By contrast, CBS Mornings, while still in third place among morning shows, has delivered solid enough results to be considered a bright spot. King, one of the network’s top personalities, recently signed a new deal, as did Dokoupil, who now also hosts a third hour of the show. The Coates interview also came as the news division was riding high after hosting the vice presidential debate and landing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.
While Dokoupil’s interview became a flashpoint that led to McMahon and Roark’s comments at the editorial meeting, a source said that it was not the only time his comments have drawn concerns from other staffers. In his memo, Cheeks said that there was “strong and growing discord” that needed to be addressed at the level of an editorial meeting.
During the interview itself, Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates left little room for other CBS voices the conversation, presenting harder-hitting talk than is typical of the morning show setting.
In an interview for Trevor Noah’s podcast, Coates said that King, who is one of the news division’s top personalities, had shown him before the segment with his book and extensive notes on it, signaling that she would ask him a number of questions. She ended up asking him just one during the segment, which ran for almost seven minutes.
Prior to the CBS episode, The Daily Show, which airs on Paramount’s Comedy Central, aired a long and congenial interview with Coates by Monday host John Stewart.
While there is a mixture of opinion over how Dokoupil questioned Coates, there was some confusion about why the news division leadership delivered a rebuke in the all-staff meeting. Although staffers were asked to keep the conversation confidential, it quickly leaked, not entirely unsurprising given that it is the news business. During the meeting, one correspondent, Jan Crawford, said, “It sounds like we are calling out one of our anchors in a somewhat public setting on this call for failing to meet editorial standards for, I’m not even sure what.” The call, published on the site Free Press, helped magnify the story, making it bigger than typical disagreements do over network coverage.
While CBS News is in the spotlight now, other networks have also seen their internal discord over coverage of culturally divisive issues and figures spill out into the open — albeit the Israel-Gaza conflict has raised deeply emotional opinions on representation and context.
NBC News’ efforts to hire Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, drew an internal revolt that saw MSNBC anchors publicly blast the network decision. Cesar Conde, chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, reversed the hiring.
Last year, CNN staffers raised their objections to the network’s decision to host a town hall with Donald Trump, with Christiane Amanpour going public with her disagreements over the event.
Meanwhile, news division heads have to grapple with the realities of the business: Making more with less, given the decline in the linear TV business.
