A Sea Change in the Mainstream Media

Newly announced CBS news anchor, Tony Dukoupil (CBS)

I had always respected the mainstream media for its professionalism and what I believed was fair and balanced reporting. On a subject that I was acutely attuned to, one could occasionally detect bias on the part of a reporter or an anchor. But I usually chalked it up to ignorance of the facts of a particular issue or an awkward presentation that was unintentionally misleading.

Although some media outlets like the BBC - were clearly and blatantly biased against Israel, I never attributed that kind of animus to the three major evening network newscasts. I always gave them the benefit of the doubt.

That changed drastically over the last two years. In their reporting about the war in Gaza, just about every mainstream media outlet expressed so much obvious bias against Israel that it could hardly be attributed to ignorance of the facts or an awkward presentations.

Without belaboring the point, suffice it to say that the typical narrative focused on Israel  as the aggressor - targeting suspected Hamas strongholds in sensitive and densely populated areas like hospitals or schools. Killing disproportionate numbers of civilians with daily airstrikes. Every night, casualty figures provided by Hamas officials were repeated as fact, with no serious attempt to present Israel’s side of the story. Israel’s explanations – if mentioned at all - were framed as dubious. While Palestinian reporters inside Gaza were treated as paragons of truth, narrating those same Hamas-supplied numbers as bloody images of dead and injured Palestinian women and children flashed on the screen.

Every nefarious accusation by Hamas (and their UN sympathizers) against Israel was treated as gospel. While Israel’s denials or explanations were treated as suspect. The bias was unmistakable even though the network anchors avoided explicitly calling Israel a liar.

The worst offender was CBS. They hired Imtiaz Tiab, a former Al Jazeera reporter as their primary correspondent in Gaza. His coverage amounted to an almost daily bashing of Israel with hardly any mention of Israel’s perspective.

I never realized just how biased the mainstream media had become until I witnessed how this war was covered. But after two years of non stop Israel bashing by the mainstream media, I have been duly chastised. I don’t trust a word they say anymore.  No matter how carefully they try to disguise it, their bias shines through quite brightly.

But… There’s a new sheriff in town. And it appears that things are abut to change.

CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was recently purchased by Skydance. Its CEO, David Ellison, is not inclined to tolerate the kind of blatant anti-Israel bias demonstrated by CBS News. He has already replaced the head of the news division with former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss, who famously resigned from the Times after harassment from colleagues over her more balanced perspective on Israel.

Weiss’s commitment to fairness is reflected in the latest shakeup at CBS. She has replaced the two current evening news anchors with Tony Dokoupil—someone who had the courage to challenge the network’s anti-Israel orthodoxy. That courage was visible in an incident just over a year ago, as reported in The New York Times:

During a 2024 interview, Dokoupil challenged author Ta-Nehisi Coates about a new book he had written on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Dokoupil told Coates that some of the material “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” and asked: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”

Coates replied: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state; I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”

Some CBS journalists objected to how Dokoupil handled the interview, and newsroom leadership rebuked him on a conference call, saying the interview fell short of editorial standards. That prompted Shari Redstone, then-owner of Paramount, to defend Dokoupil and reprimand her own executives, saying “they made a mistake” in questioning him.

Weiss—then publisher of The Free Press—was all over the story, voicing her outrage at how this award winning veteran journalist had been treated by his bosses at  CBS news. She wrote, “It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations.”

Tony Dokoupil is a highly respected journalist, and it is unlikely that he will be accused of bias. His commitment to fairness and balanced has surely not changed that. And it doesn’t hurt that he has a son serving in the IDF.

I could not be more pleased by this turn of events. With Dokoupil at the helm, he will not only report the news but also have full editorial control over the content and  how it is presented. That means that, for the first time in a long time, the mainstream media will have at least one respected major news network, CBS, presenting the  nightly news which will not reflexively cast Israel in a negative light.

It remains to be seen what will happen to Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation. She is easily the most anti-Israel host of any Sunday morning interview news  program. My guess is that she, too, will have to change her tone. Or she may find herself being replaced too. And out of a job. 

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