CBS News is facing a civil war over presenter Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Accusations are coming from within the network that Dokoupil, who pushed back on Coates’s more dramatic claims, was overly aggressive. The interview earlier this week, centred on Coates’s latest book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, has triggered some tortured internal debate about what the role of a journalist is — and if there’s a double standard at work when subjects such as Coates, a darling of the social justice movement, are involved.

“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?” Dokoupil asked Coates, referring to the latter’s book on the current conflict. “Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?”

This line of questioning, however, was deemed a bridge too far. “We have to check our biases and opinions at the door,” CBS’s head of newsgathering, Adrienne Roark, said during an editorial call on Monday. “We are here to report the news without fear or favour.”

Dokoupil was chastised for the interview, with CBS News executives bringing in a “DEI expert” to help smooth things over. Simon Sebag Montefiore, a historian of Soviet Russia who authored a book on Stalin’s purges, wrote on X: “Cultural Revolution struggle session vibes are strong after a reasonable questioning of author of a preposterous book but this is what happens when a factfree establishmentarian orthodoxy is questioned.”

The internal uproar points out a phenomenon that is by now fairly obvious: there’s a sacred status afforded to figures like Coates, who are more symbols of ideology than participants in real debate. The contrast with another black thinker, Coleman Hughes, a writer who rejects the race-driven politics advanced by Coates, illustrates how this works. In April, Hughes appeared on The View to speak about his book, The End of Race Politics, and was attacked by Sunny Hostin, who told him: “Many in the black community […] believe you are being used as a pawn by the Right, that you’re a charlatan of sorts.” There was no outcry from within ABC News, which airs The View, or the wider media — something Hughes himself called out in the context of the recent scandal regarding Coates.

Although the media echo chamber has a deafening effect on its participants, the broader culture is listening and watching. In the golden age of legacy media, clips could be edited, and unflattering takes, such Hostin’s moment with Hughes, could be memory-holed. Today, however, on X and other social media platforms, we’re able to see the side-by-side comparisons—and what we’re seeing is damning. We’re witnessing a media that’s caving in on itself, unable to endure the slightest hint of dissent even in the mildest of settings, such as a morning news show interview with a bestselling author. And at the same time, we’re also seeing the same media fawn over the establishment’s chosen political candidate, Kamala Harris, going so far as to surreptitiously edit clips of her 60 Minutes interview to make her sound more coherent.

The media’s credibility is already teetering. Incidents like this will only push it closer to the edge as the world watches an elite trying to balance too many prerogatives while only one should count: telling the truth.

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Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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