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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With the context of Dokoupil calling Coates a “radical,” Colbert asked, “You went yourself to go over there and you saw what you saw and you write it in this book, and it's quite harrowing and it's heartbreaking, at times enraging, but regardless of what someone's critique might be of your journalism, this is really a journal of what you experienced over there. Do you have any surprise about being perceived as writing something radical? Because the facts of what you are seeing are not in dispute, it's why didn't you balance it?”
Coates replied that he wasn’t “the implicit thesis of that essay is that an entire group of people, that being Palestinians, have been pushed out of frame, that they don't exist as narrators of their own stories. If that is true, and if it's true of most major media, as I contend, then it makes sense that people in major media would not be happy about that. So no, I wasn't surprised.”
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