While CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s colleague Tony Dokoupil was never explicitly mentioned, he loomed over Colbert’s Wednesday interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates as the duo discussed reaction to his anti-Israel book on The Late Show. Coates, for his part, was unrepentant as he defended the decision to leave out any mention of terrorism when discussing the current situation in the West Bank.
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Colbert then finally brought up the obvious, “You've been criticized because, for quote, ‘Not showing the whole picture,’ you don't talk about Hamas, you don't mention Hamas, you don’t talk about the massacre and the horrors of October 7th or the violence against Israelis or their fear about the existence of their own state. Why did you decide to write this book this way?”
Coates self-righteously replied that context doesn’t matter, “First of all, this is not—this is a 250-page book. It's not a history of Israel/Palestine. It is a writer seeking to answer a question, and that is how did he get it wrong, how were his views so different from what he actually saw, and so a large part of that… was because the very people who were communicating to me what the situation was there—I lost trust in them, and so when you lose trust in the media that actually trains you, you have to find your own way, you have to find your own method, and the thing that I was not seeing was the Palestinian perspective, and I made a very, very conscious choice to center that.”
[See NewsBusters for more]
