In my first job out of college I worked as staffer for a conservative Democratic legislator (there used to be conservative Democrats) named John Plewa.
John was a good guy and he represented his heavily Catholic district on the Southside of Milwaukee well. He emphasized constituent service and he pretty well reflected their views when it came time to vote.
That included abortion, John was pro-life, but he knew I was pro-choice when he hired me. He asked me in the interview if I could work on that issue, not directly confronting my own views on the subject. I answered that I would be working for him and that, while I might want to advise him on issues on which he was open to advice, my job would be to implement his positions, not my own.
That was good enough for John and he hired me. And I did work on abortion issues for him, though none of those bills came anywhere near passing. In the meantime, I also worked on what became his signature piece of legislation: the nation’s first family and medical leave law. And when a Supreme Court decision made it more likely that some of John’s legislation on abortion might become law, that was a bridge too far and, amicably, I resigned and took a job with Madison Rep. Spencer Black, whose views were pretty much identical to my own.
I bring this up now because we’ve just had yet another high-profile example of whining young workers. Let’s call them the WYW. This time it’s over an interview conducted by CBS’ Tony Dokoupil with author Ta-Nehesi Coates. Coates is on tour in support of his book on the Middle East in which he takes the side of the Palestinians and compares Israel to the South under Jim Crow.
He told Dokoupil that in a visit to the region he found, “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” In other words, ignore the actions of Hamas that precipitated what is admittedly a brutal Israeli response. That point of view — it’s okay to ignore troubling countervailing facts when they don’t fit your self-righteous narrative — is prevalent among the cadre of writers of Coates’ ilk on the hard-left, like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo and Nikole Hannah Jones.
So Dokoupil did what good journalists would do: he challenged Coates. This is something that the hard-left dislikes. Once a moral statement has been spoken by one of its members it may not be challenged.
After the interview young (I’m making an assumption here) CBS staffers blew up. One of their favorite writers who had confirmed their views about one of their most passionate causes had been questioned. They went to management and management caved. CBS publicly rebuked Dokoupil who did nothing that Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite wouldn’t have done.
This kind of thing has been going on for too long. When Woody Allen tried to get a book published, his publisher caved to WYW’s who found him guilty of sexual assault amid ancient and shaky claims made by Mia Farrow and Farrow’s son. When the New York Times published an oped by hard-right Sen. Tom Cotton suggesting that federal troops be called out to quell riots after the killing of George Floyd (admittedly a stupid idea), young staffers got the editorial page editor fired. When an NPR editor courageously pointed out the obvious hard-left bias at the network WYW’s forced him to resign.
Since I’m not a parent myself, I’m not sure how this generation of self-important, entitled kids got raised. But this is also on management. Their job is not to coddle. When WYW’s do their whining their job is to remind them that their employer is not there to reenforce their worldview. If they disagree they can take their immeasurable talents to another venue.
Dogs are getting wagged by tails all over the place. Time to reenforce a sensible order.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
One interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell, Ta-Nehisi Coates was not particularly offended by the tough questions. He wrote a book which he knew would offend some people and probably expected some blowback. Tony Dokoupil was doing his job and Coates went to the interview to sell his book, which this controversy should help.
The CBS response – to scold their reporter for doing his job – is embarrassing but I haven’t heard Coates himself complain.
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Right. I’m not aware that Coates has complained about the interview.
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“In other words, ignore the actions of Hamas that precipitated what is admittedly a brutal Israeli response.”
I have not read Coates’ book, but my understanding is that he is addressing the oppression of the Palestinians over the past 70 years, not the past year of violence between Israel and Hamas.
The Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation, in the absence of basic rights, for generations now. The situation in the West Bank is in fact apartheid, although it’s not politically correct to say. The horrific Oct 7 attack by Hamas doesn’t change that. It’s not a “countervailing fact.”
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It’s not politically correct to call that apartheid? The left has been calling it worse — genocide — for a year.
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How many U.S. elected officials would refer to it as such? Maybe 2? 3?
Political correctness is not a uniquely left-wing phenomenon. Giving Israel a pass for human rights abuses is a form bipartisan political correctness that every U.S. president has followed for decades.
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“it’s okay to ignore troubling countervailing facts when they don’t fit your self-righteous narrative — is prevalent among…” the mainstream of US society, especially as it pertains to this topic. “admittedly a brutal Israeli response” is a euphemism. How many innocent people have to die and be maimed, how much infrastructure has to be destroyed before if moves past “brutal”? I imagine lots of people think they’ll know it when they see it, while they simultaneously shield their eyes from seeing anything whatsoever, aided by a compliant media.
Nobody is ignoring the actions of Hamas any more than a critique of US military actions post-9/11 is ignoring the actions of Al-Qaeda. In both cases essentially the entire world was aghast and supportive of the victims. And in both cases the government response was disproportionate and opportunistic (never let a crisis go to waste), resulting in justified outrage and protest.
If a terrorist attack is a shield behind which a nation is permitted to undertake literally any war crime and deny literally any human right without critique or consequence, that’s a bargain that a lot of world leaders are happy to take. And it’s a guarantee that this will be a recurring tragedy.
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Wild to make argument based upon your biases, without any evidence your bias is true. And in fact, many journalists were speaking out in real time to the questioning, it has nothing to do with coddling. Especially without engaging with Coates words, arguments, or writings. Just dismissal, as you seem to do with anything around race you seem to disagree with— you don’t actually engage with the ideas, just dismiss or present other peoples arguments against.
And what are you doing other than whining here? Supporting a dominant argument, that reinforces your own world view. It seams you can’t handle anyone strongly pushing up against your own world view without whining about it, appears that’s what half this blog is. Dismissing and whining when your world view is challenged. Why should an organization be so fragile as to not accept internal criticism of a world view their presenting? Such a fragile little man you are. If your scope of challenging yourself is reading the NYT and WSJ as two “competing” entities, then you are truly intellectually shallow. As neither actually present a different world view, just different takes of the same world view.
And yes, it is an apartheid state, and a genocide being committed is an act, apartheid is a social structure. These two things can happen at the same time. You demonstrate a complete lack of analysis of these things, the pure arrogance to write about them in such a self-assured manor is wild, when you refuse to work to actually understand what they are.
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