CBS News’ new DEI consultant may need to take some racial sensitivity training of his own.
Network brass reportedly tapped Dr. Donald Grant — who dubs himself a “mental health expert DEI strategist and trauma trainer” on his Instagram — to quell internal turmoil after they declared an interview between morning show host Tony Dokoupil and author Ta-Nehisi Coates was not up to its “editorial standards.”
But CBS may want to reconsider its choice of mediator.
The apparently MAGA-hating Grant, who is black, posted an altered cover of the classic Harriet Beecher Stowe novel about slavery “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” — featuring the face of Donald Trump-supporting South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott photoshopped over the images of several other characters.
The post to Grant’s Instagram account, which he put up earlier this year, changed the title to “Uncle Tim’s Cabin” and also included an image of conservative commentator Candace Owens.
A source close to the situation called the move by CBS News “idiotic” and pointed to the irony that the Tiffany Network would hire someone who is “insanely racist.”
CBS News did not comment on its decision to tap Grant, which was first report by Puck News.
Scott immediately jumped on the controversial decision to bring in Grant, re-posting his altered book cover on the Win Red fund-raising platform late Monday.
“The disgusting rhetoric above is EXACTLY what’s in store for us if we allow the Radical and Intolerant left to win,” Scott wrote.
“If you believe in a Stronger America, if you believe that we are better together than we are divided, then I’m counting on you to stand with me right now!”
Earlier in the day, the network raised hackles among CBS News staffers after calling out Dokoupil for pressing Coates about the controversial author’s pro-Palestinian framing of Hamas’ war with Israel during last week’s testy interview on “CBS Mornings.”
CBS News boss Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark, the president of content development for the news division, claimed the “CBS Mornings” host brought his own bias to the interview with Coates during the meeting with workers on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, according to multiple reports.
They said the sit-down, conducted last week, did not meet editorial standards for impartiality — though they declined to provide any details, Puck News and Bari Weiss’s Free Press reported.
“We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door,” Roark said, according to the outlets. “We are here to report news without fear or favor.”
The strong criticism did not sit well with several Dokoupil’s backers, including CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford.
“I don’t even understand how Tony’s interview failed to meet our editorial standards… I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford was quoted as saying by Puck.
“When someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of very complex situation — which Coates himself acknowledges that he has — it’s my understanding that as a journalist we are obligated to challenge that worldview, so that our viewers can have access to the truth and can have a more balanced account.”
Critics on social media and CBS staffers blasted Dokoupil’s direct questioning about Coates’ book “The Message,” in which he condemned what he called Israeli “apartheid” in its administration of the territories captured in the Six-Day War of 1967.
Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism whose ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children, took issue with Coates, saying that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” due to its characterization of Israel.
Dokoupil asked Coates why he didn’t include more pro-Israel voices or note in his work that “little kids [were] blown to bits” in Palestinian terrorist attacks.
“Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?” Dokoupil asked.
Coates replied that the Israeli narrative was well-represented in the American mainstream press and that few Palestinian voices had a chance to be heard.
“I wrote a 260-page book,” Coates said. “It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Coates said, acknowledging that the account was based on his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank.
Crawford praised Dokoupil for “challeng[ing] Coates’ one-sided worldview” and then giving the author a chance to respond.
“It was civil…I don’t see how we can say that it failed to meet our editorial standards,” Crawford is reported to have said.
She added that Dokoupil “prevented a one-sided account from being broadcast on our network about a deeply complex situation that completely was devoid of history or fact. “As journalists, that’s what we have an obligation to do.”
