There’s disagreement at the top of CBS about morning show co-host Tony Dokoupil’s contentious Sept. 30 interview with the author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
By Jeremy Barr
But Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS, said Wednesday morning that Dokoupil “did a great job” during the interview.
“I think he handled himself and showed the world a role model of what civil discourse is,” she said at an advertising conference in New York. “He showed that there was accountability, that there is a system of checks and balances, and frankly, I was very proud of the work that he did.”
And she criticized CBS News leadership for taking Dokoupil to task.
“As hard as it was, frankly, for me to go against the company, because I love this company, and I believe in it, and I think we have a great, great executive team, I think they made a mistake here,” she told the crowd.
Redstone said she has been in touch with the network’s leaders and with someone who works on diversity training issues, “and I think we all agree that this was not handled correctly, and we all agree that something needs to be done.”
Redstone, who controls the media empire her father, Sumner Redstone, built, acknowledged that she lacks “editorial control” of the network. But, she said, “I have a voice in our platform, like all of us, and, as you may know, I don’t hesitate to use it.”
Still, she said she was glad that Coates was given an opportunity to appear on the network’s morning show. “But we have to also provide the opportunity to challenge him on what he says, just like we challenge everybody else, whether they’re politicians, friends or in any arena that we deal with,” she added.
Redstone’s comments add a new dimension to a story that has caused internal angst at CBS News — as well as wide discussion across the media industry — since the interview.
CBS News leadership decided to address the situation Monday after employees from across the company had come to management with concerns about Dokoupil’s coverage, according to a network insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
Coates himself lamented that, because of Dokoupil’s “commandeering” of the interview, co-hosts Gayle King and Nate Burleson didn’t have the opportunity to weigh in, even as he said King had been heavily prepared for the interview and had chatted with him backstage about some of the points she wanted to hit on. “I’m really, really sorry for them,” Coates said during an episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast that will be released Thursday.
However, Redstone was not alone in thinking that CBS News’s leaders should not have called out Dokoupil in front of his colleagues Monday. The network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, argued that Dokoupil did his job by contesting what she said was Coates’s “one-sided account of a very complex situation.”
“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,” Crawford told her bosses during the meeting. “I thought our commitment was to truth.”
Dokoupil has not addressed the situation publicly, but the New York Post reported on Tuesday — and The Washington Post confirmed — that he expressed regrets to his colleagues during a morning show meeting.
A CBS News spokesperson declined to comment when asked about Redstone’s comments.
Redstone, 70, is a strong backer of Israel and has previously questioned why there was not more outrage over the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
