'CBS News' tells staff: Don't say Jerusalem is in Israel

(JNS) — An executive at CBS, in an email in August, instructed employees to “not refer to Jerusalem as being in Israel,” The Free Press reported on Thursday.

Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at the news department of the New York-based broadcasting network, acknowledged that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but added this did not mean that CBS should accept this.

“Yes, the U.S. embassy is there 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,” Memmott wrote.

The revelation follows a controversy at CBS involving a Sept. 30 interview with activist Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, which features one-sided anti-Israel talking points.

In a tense but cordial exchange in that interview, CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil, who is Jewish, pressed Coates on why he left out key facts about Israel.

This reportedly led to internal criticism within CBS, which is often criticized for adopting a left-wing bias. Subsequently, CBS News senior officials Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark on Oct. 7 said in an internal meeting that the interview fell short of “editorial standards” at the network, according to an account by The Free Press, which obtained audio of the meeting.

Shari Redstone, chairwoman of CBS parent company Paramount Global, defended Dokoupil and said at a public meeting that admonishing him was a “mistake.”

CBS CEO George Cheeks later appeared to justify the criticism of Dokoupil in a statement he issued on Oct. 9.

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,” Cheeks wrote.