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There are times when terrible books can be useful. In the case of Ta-Nehisi Coates' truly awful The Message, the author has not only demonstrated exactly how and why America's chattering classes have not just turned on Israel and are supporting an ideological war against its existence. Coates has given us more than that.
During his book tour of the mainstream media, he also helped illustrate how a mob mentality and woke bureaucratic structures have gutted a supposedly prestigious legacy outlet like CBS News. At virtually every other stop, Coates was treated as a hero, offered only softball questions and never challenged about the bogus nature of his latest work. But one journalist, Tony Dokoupil, a host on CBS Mornings, had the temerity to ask Coates some tough questions about the inaccuracies of his book and its true intent, which is to delegitimize and amplify calls for Israel's destruction.
For doing what any honest journalist would do when interviewing an author of an extremist polemic that calls for eliminating the one Jewish state on the planet, Dokoupil was publicly shamed by the network for failing to maintain its "editorial standards."
A sin against the DEI catechism
As the Free Press documented by publishing a tape of the meeting, executives apologized to other staffers (who had reportedly generated this struggle session by swamping the heads of the network's news division with complaints) for his supposed misbehavior. Reportedly, Dokoupil responded with tearful regrets. Then, to add insult to injury, he was later subjected to what everyone dreads in the brave new corporate world in which the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rules supreme. He was summoned to a grilling by the network's in-house "Race and Culture Unit" for offending Coates with his "tone of voice, phrasing and body language" during the interview.
Still, one brave reporter, Jan Crawford, a veteran legal correspondent for CBS, spoke up in dissent. She demanded to know what sort of "standards" were in place that would punish a journalist for actually doing their job. The answer from her bosses was that they would reply to her in private.
The message this sends to all journalists at the news network is that they better not ask any tough questions when interviewing those who advocate for the end of Israel. Of course, we know that the same show —and every other mainstream corporate outlet —expects their reporters to be aggressive and confrontational when they are talking to those who dissent from leftist fashion or liberal orthodoxy. In this manner, the culture of journalism has changed from one in which those employed by these outlets view their jobs as more one of liberal/leftist activism than objective reporting. Anything that advances their political goals is to be praised. Anything that tells a different story must be ignored or savaged. In so doing, they have enabled anti-Israel bias, even though the same standard applies across the board to every topic and political controversy.
To fully understand the context of how Coates is mainstreaming the leftist ideological war on Israel and being assisted by the media, it’s important to know more about him.
A literary celebrity
The first thing to understand is that Ta-Nehisi Coates is something of a colossus of contemporary American letters. Since his first article was published in 2008 in the liberal publication The Atlantic, the 49-year-old has been showered with acclaim and every conceivable honor from the cultural establishment, including an obligatory MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award. Everything he writes —from comic books to memoirs about his own brief existence on the planet —is treated as a major literary event.
Though a talented writer who styles himself as a journalist, Coates mostly pens words about himself and his personal impressions of the world without bothering much with grounding his work in facts or trying to place his ideas in a context that tells more than one narrow side of a story. Indeed, he is someone who thinks writers and journalists should not be seeking to tell both sides of complex stories, believing that they should boil everything down to conform to simplistic left-wing conclusions, whether accurate or not. That is exactly how toxic ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality work.
That philosophy is perfectly fine for comic books, such as Coates' best-selling Black Panther series, which imagines a fictional high-tech African kingdom that was made into a blockbuster action movie. However, when it comes to his interpretations of American society and foreign conflicts, he seems to view the real world with all of its complexities as just another graphic fantasy populated only by heroes and villains.
But such is the prestige that Coates has acquired that everything he writes is not merely taken seriously but usually trumpeted as revealed truth, whether an essay advocating reparations for African-Americans or his writings about contemporary racism, which he never fails to point out is written from the perspective of someone raised as a black man in "Jim Crow" America. The fact that he was born a decade after the triumph of the civil-rights movement and the actual end of "Jim Crow" throughout America, including in his hometown of Baltimore, is —for him and his fans —one more inconvenient fact among so many others that shouldn't spoil a good story that confirms their pre-existing prejudices. A more instructive biographical detail is that he is the son of a former Black Panther Party member turned black nationalist publisher whose most recent effort is reviving an antisemitic screed called The Jewish Onslaught.
In this way, Coates has made a career out of getting away with egregious omissions to further his racialist polemical goals. With his latest effort, The Message, a tendentious triptych to Africa and the Middle East, he hasn't just applied his usual distorted standards but produced a book that tells us everything we need to know about the intellectual war on Israel and the Jews.
Ignoring most of the story
Coates's specific conclusions about Israel, the Palestinians and the conflict in the region are of little significance. His entire personal experience on this topic consists of a single 10-day trip to "Palestine" from which he extrapolated not just 150 pages of text but a series of damning conclusions.
For Coates, everything he saw in "Palestine" —whether on Palestinian-guided tours of places like Hebron or even time spent in Haifa or Tel Aviv —was a reflection of the historical American experience of "Jim Crow" discrimination. Woke ideologues falsely analogize the Palestinian war to destroy Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. In this way, Coates superimposes his own beliefs about an America that is an irredeemably racist nation onto the complex conflict between Jews and Arabs over possession of the land of Israel. The fact that the conflict isn't racial doesn't matter because to speak of this reality would prevent him from painting a largely fictional picture of a Jewish state he would like to see destroyed.
Coates dismisses Zionism as mere colonialism. He does this in part by misconstruing the writing of Zionist founding fathers who used the word in a very different way than he does or by simply falsely claiming that Israel's birth was somehow the work of imperialism rather than by an act of what can only be fairly described as decolonization.
He ignores or dismisses the fact that by any objective standard, the Jews are the indigenous people in that small country with millennia of ties illustrated by archeological evidence as well as the historical narrative of the Bible as well as the fact that the Jewish presence on the land has been unbroken for thousands of years. For him, the archeological park at the City of David is mere Zionist propaganda.
In this way, Jewish rights and Jewish history aren't so much misinterpreted as denied altogether.
The fact that Israel is the most successful multicultural country in the world outside of the United States is similarly denied. Those Israelis who are not identifiably "white" —whether they are part of the Mizrachi majority, meaning from other countries in the Mediterranean or Arab Mideast, or Ethiopians —are merely the moral equivalent of blacks who served the Confederacy or Jim Crow governments with no legitimacy as part of a people returned to their homeland.
Equally telling is his view that the Palestinians, who play the role of oppressed former slaves in his personal psychodrama version of the Middle East, have no agency, and their actions don't matter.
Hard as it may be to imagine, his book never mentions terrorism, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, the numerous rejections of peace offers and independence by the Palestinians. Hamas and Oct. 7 rate not a single mention anywhere in his text. It is not so much an example of bad reporting or history as a parody of a book about a complicated topic.
It all leads him to believe that Israel has no right to exist, and nothing will shake him of this conviction that one Jewish state on the planet is one too many. In the context of current conflicts with Hamas in the south, Hezbollah to the north and other Iranian proxies bent on Islamizing the region, that makes him a tacit supporter of the genocide of Israeli Jews.
As such, it is, as Dokoupil pointed out, an extremist text that is pure polemic. It not only brings no original insights to the topic, it is a personal attempt by a famous writer to assert that his prejudicial attempt to portray Israel as a reflection of a racist America of the past is more important than any facts, history or actual reporting. But since such a mighty African-American celebrity may not be accused of advocacy for genocide, these are facts that may not be mentioned in Coates's presence.
Serious people and responsible media ought to treat his book as unworthy of comment. The legacy media, however, sees it as a meditation of great importance that must not to be probed in the same way any book that brings a funhouse mirror look at a complex set of issues would be.
The collapse of mainstream journalism
The fact that, for example, CNN's Fareed Zakaria (someone the foreign-policy establishment wrongly treats as the gold standard in journalism) gave Coates a lengthy interview during which he allowed him to spout his hate for Israel almost unchallenged is significant. That Zakaria gave far less time to the 75-year-old French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy —the author of a much more important book about Oct. 7 and its ramifications titled Israel Alone —on the same program spoke volumes about Coates's celebrity and the distorted values of the news network.
So, while this latest book by Coates will not likely be remembered, its reception and the opprobrium directed at Dokoupil deserve to be noted as yet another moment in which the moral bankruptcy of American journalism was made obvious.
A generation of young journalists —educated largely in elite institutions of higher learning where they were indoctrinated in the same toxic theories that animate Coates' writing —are not only ready to applaud such tripe. They believe that anyone who calls him out is, by definition, a right-wing racist whose views must be suppressed.
Though reportedly, Shari Redstone —the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global, which owns CBS —told network executives that she disagreed with how the situation was handled, such interventions aren't nearly enough to reverse the damage being done to American journalism by the woke tide. The tipping point at outlets like CBS and The New York Times was reached four years ago during the Black Lives Matter riots as "progressives" took over newsrooms, intimidating editors and publishers alike.
The problem today is not just the fact that intellectual quacks like Coates are embraced by literary fashion and reflect what has become orthodox beliefs at most colleges and universities. It's that the best defense any republic has against the spread of such myths —a free press —has already capitulated to the liars. The controversy over Coates's book shows that the mainstream media has already discarded journalism in favor of leftist activism, which helps facilitate the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism. It is way past time to stop treating these outlets as journalism and view them, as we should Coates, as simple purveyors of woke propaganda.
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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of Jewish News Syndicate. He's been a JWR contributor since 1998.