CBS News boss calls threats against Gayle King "reprehensible"

AP

“We fully support Gayle King and her integrity as a journalist,” CBS News president Susan Zirinsky told The Associated Press on Saturday. “We find the threats against her or any journalist doing their job reprehensible.” Zirinsky's comments come one day after Oprah Winfrey said King is "not doing well" and has received death threats for bringing up Kobe Bryant's 2003 sexual assault case in an interview with WNBA star Lisa Leslie. Snoop Dogg has been King's most prominent critic (joined by Bill Cosby and 50 Cent), telling her to “back off ... before we come get you" and scolding her for attacking “your people" in a video posted to Instagram. Snoop's threat has prompted prominent people like former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former presidential candidate Cory Booker, Today's Willie Geist and Ava DuVernay have come to King's defense. "This is despicable. Gayle King is one of the most principled, fair and tough journalists alive," Rice tweeted. "Snoop, back the **** off. You come for @GayleKing, you come against an army. You will lose, and it won’t be pretty." Meanwhile, African-American women's magazine Essence called King's treatment "a case study of the inability to critique black women without tearing them down in the process," adding: "If you’re a Black woman reading this, you no doubt know the immeasurable weight of misogynoir. We’re always in danger of being crushed beneath the precarious burden of racism and sexism. We bob and weave our way through a patriarchy that makes no real space for us, especially if we dare to break free of the tropes of who we are expected to be. But if the backlash to King clarifies anything, it is that retribution never seems more swift than when Black women step outside of the confines of how a Black man expects us to speak, act, or think. It is how some people in Black communities can go from extolling the virtues of being a #GirlDad one moment, to being out for the blood of a woman who dared to go off of their approved script of behavior the next."