CBS News Reportedly Instructed Journalists to Avoid Saying Jerusalem Is In Israel
CBS News instructed its journalists not to identify Jerusalem as being a part of Israel, much less its capital.
According to a new report from The Free Press, CBS News senior director of standards and practices Mark Memmott sent an email to staff in late August directing them not to “refer” to Jerusalem “as being in Israel.”
“Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed,” continued Memmott. “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.”
West Jerusalem was integrated into Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, while East Jerusalem was occupied beginning in 1967, during the Six-Day War.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian authorities East Jerusalem as their sovereign capital in 2000 and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the same in 2008 as part of a larger peace deal. Both offers were rejected.
In 1995, the U.S. Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and set a goal for moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by 1999. For over two decades, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama signed waivers every six months to delay the application of the act. After signing one such waiver in 2017, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. The U.S. embassy was officially relocated there the following year.
The status of Jerusalem is indeed hotly contested. To date, only five countries have opened their embassies in Israel in Jerusalem, while the remaining 91 states with diplomatic relations await a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians which resolves the status of Jerusalem to open theirs.
The revelation that CBS policy is not to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital — or any part of it as being a part of Israel — comes amidst a public debate over the network’s chastisement of CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil over his recent interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
While the network has maintained that their conversation — which included several tough questions from Dokoupil — did not conform with their editorial standards, others have maintained that the network is punishing him for challenging Coates’s one-sided perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
CBS had yet to respond to a request for comment on Memmott’s email ahead of publishing time.
