Two months ago (August), Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at the news department of the CBS told his employees not to refer to Jerusalem as being part of Israel: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there [in Jerusalem] and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
The comes after an internal controversy at CBS involving an interview with activist Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, 'The Message.' In the book, Coates describes Israel's 'occupying the territories' as aparthead and also accuses Israel of treating Palestinians the way that black people are treated in America and Africa.
During the interview, which took place on September 30th, Dokoupil, who is a convert to Judaism asked Coates: "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?”
Dokoupil was reprimanded for being overly harsh towards Coates. CBS News senior officials Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark on Oct. 7 said that his interview fell short of “editorial standards” at the network, according to an account by The Free Press.
Although the chairwoman of CBS parent company Paramount Global defended Dokoupil, CEO George Cheeks disagreed, saying that the uproar over the interview “must lead to 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.”
Yesterday (Sunday) Benny Gantz, who is the leader of Israel’s opposition National Unity Party responded on X: “Jerusalem’s status is clear and undisputed—the eternal capital of the Jewish people. It has been so for millennia, and will always remain so. No attempt to distort or hide that reality will change it."
The New York Post contributed to this article.