Say, remember when CBS News put anchor Tony Dokoupil through a Maoist struggle session for the crime of asking tough questions to Ta-Nehisi Coates for his ignorant take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? They rushed to hire a "DEI strategist and trauma trainer" to assuage their outraged staff, angry that Dokoupil asked Coates to account for his fanciful assertions in his book, almost as though no one at CBS News knows what an actual interview looks like. 

Bari Weiss got the leaked audio of the staff meeting called to humiliate Dokoupil and pronounced herself aghast:

WATCH: @BariWeiss breaks down the leaked audio—obtained exclusively by The FP—from a CBS meeting in which their anchor was admonished for questioning Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel:

“Tony Dokoupil committed the sin of doing real journalism on morning TV.” https://t.co/7Q2WGaQx7O pic.twitter.com/5rF1SVIngb

— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 8, 2024

All of this provides context for yet another CBS News scandal -- and this may be the most disgusting yet. 

National Review's Ryan Mills reports that the network has hailed and promoted the work of their producer in Gaza, Marwan Al Ghoul, on whom they rely for news in the war, since foreign journalists are excluded from the area. A new report from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) shows that Al Ghoul routinely makes anti-Semitic remarks, has displayed considerable bias against the Israelis both before and during the war, and that his cameraman son who also works for CBS may be even worse:

Al Ghoul’s Facebook posts over the last year indicate that he is a vocal critic of Israel. On several occasions he’s accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a false but common belief among Palestinians. In a Facebook post on January 12, he thanked South Africa, which was making the case at the United Nations that Israel was committing genocide.

Al Ghoul has alleged that the Israel Defense Forces are committing war crimes against children and accused Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu of stupidity. In December, he accused Israel of killing innocent people to satisfy its instinct for bloodshed.

In a post on June 8, he expressed disapproval of an Israeli raid that freed four hostages Hamas had captured and held in civilian homes. He accepted Hamas’s contention that more than 200 civilians were killed in the operation — the IDF reported that the casualty numbers were much lower — and failed to note that many of the dead were terrorists.

Al Ghoul makes no pretense of objectivity on his Facebook account. The day that Hamas launched a wave of atrocities throughout southern Israel, murdering 1200 and raping scores or hundreds of women while kidnapping another 250-plus people, Al Ghoul prayed for victory: "Oh Allah, we ask you for patience and victory." 

But even before Hamas launched the war, Al Ghoul had no trouble posting his anti-Semitic thoughts on Facebook. He seems fond of the notion that Jews are sub-human, a recurring theme on his social media accounts, according to CAMERA's research -- which has screenshots to back up all of their reporting:

In a long Facebook post in May 2022, he wrote about a young girl he met at Al-Shifa Hospital who had been injured in an Israeli attack. The girl asked him why she’d been burned and if Jews were human, too, he wrote. Al Ghoul wrote that the girl’s question summarized his 34-year career. “Are Jews really human like us??????” he wrote.

He also “liked” several comments on the post, including one that called Jews “Zionist, Nazi killers,” and another that said Jews were “not human at all” but are instead “monsters in human form,” according to a translation.

These are not the thoughts of an objective news reporter. They are the public statements of a propagandist, and arguably one that fits in quite well with Hamas. And yet, as Mills notes, CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell and other CBS News figures routinely praise Al Ghoul's contributions.

So ... will Al Ghoul get subjected to a struggle session like Dokoupil did? Scolded over his hate-filled screeds? Fired, perhaps? Almost certainly not. Al Ghoul allows CBS News to pass along Hamas propaganda as "news," and to paint Israel's defensive war against terrorism as "genocide" despite it being started by the worst death toll among Jews since the Holocaust. That's why they hire Gazan "news" producers in the first place. 

And that's why American trust in the media currently plumbs the depths of public rejection. Last week, Gallup found that only 31% of American adults put a great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly" -- the lowest rating in 52 years of polling on the question. Nearly seven in ten Americans don't put very much trust at all in the Protection Racket Media, and 36% say they have no trust in media, full stop. 

Why? Because the Protection Racket Media doesn't report news; they publish narratives, and they hire people who will promote their preferred propaganda. That's why Tony Dokoupil ended up in a Maoist struggle session for committing the crime of asking a tendentious author to explain the holes in his argument, while a rabid Hamas advocate gets praised on air and off by CBS News execs. 

We talk about this more often now because the crisis in media isn't just coming -- it has arrived. The mainstream media has transformed itself into the propaganda arm of the Left, and they work hard to intimidate advertisers and pressure Big Tech into choking off access to competing points of view. We hope we can gather as many allies as possible to keep all of these issues in the public square – and indeed to preserve the public square at all.

Join us in the fight. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code FAKENEWS to receive a 50% discount on your membership. And check out our new Platinum level for access to Townhall TV, private writer messaging, and  more!

Meanwhile, my conversations with Andrew Malcolm on my podcast remain outside the exclusive VIP zone. Today we talk about the other CBS News scandal at 60 Minutes, as well as the media meltdown over Donald McDonald's. 

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!