Insiders have unloaded on CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s “amateur hour” broadcast on the Fourth of July.
Dokoupil, 45, was stationed at the National Mall for a three-hour, primetime special on Independence Day, but the broadcast quickly unraveled when storms rolled in, leaving him off the air for a third of the show as he waited for direction from CBS News boss Bari Weiss, the New York Post has revealed.
“Tony and Nischelle waited one hour in the rain for Bari or Tom to tell them to go to the studio,” a network source told the Post, calling the broadcast “amateur hour.”
A network source pushed back on that account, telling the Post the anchors were waiting to see whether the Secret Service would allow them back onto the Mall, which had been evacuated three hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to give his big speech.
With Dokoupil and Turner out of the action, backup anchor Kelly O’Grady took over from CBS’s D.C. studio while weatherman Rob Marciano provided occasional weather hits from New York.
By the time Dokoupil and Turner abandoned plans to return to the Mall and joined O’Grady at the D.C. studio around 9:45 p.m, an hour and 45 minutes of the three-hour special had already passed.
The broadcast left some of the staffers “mortified,” a source told the Post.
Nearly 100 staffers were enlisted to work on the July 4 broadcasts and had put in long hours to prepare for the special, dubbed “The Great American Block Party 250,” a source said.
A spokesman for CBS News defended the broadcast, telling the Post, “Despite the weather evacuation, our exceptional team never missed a step. We seamlessly activated our pre-planned weather contingencies to deliver great coverage for our audience.”
One source told the Post that despite the “disastrous” production, CBS News executive editor Tom Cibrowski sent a congratulatory email to the staffers involved.
“It would have been better if they said nothing,” the source said. “We knew it was s--t.”
The source blamed the problems on a shortage of producers and also the lack of decisive leadership from Dokoupil, his executive producer, Kim Harvey, as well as Cibrowski and Weiss.
“It’s a rudderless ship,” the source told the Post.
The special is no longer available on CBS’s streaming service Paramount+ or on CBS.com, with a source suggesting the network was likely “embarrassed” by it. However, a network source told the Post that the video was not posted due to licensing restrictions.
CBS did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
The first sign of trouble had come on Friday, when CBS Evening News mistakenly aired an image of Kanye West instead of Sean “Diddy” Combs during a report about President Donald Trump weighing a pardon for Combs. The image of West was taken during his surprise appearance at Combs’ trial last year.
The mix-up was quietly scrubbed from the show’s West Coast broadcast and its digital and streaming feeds, but a source told the Post that it was a symptom of a newsroom stretched thin.
“They are drinking from a fire hose,” a network source told the Post. “This sort of thing should not happen. Where is the quality control?”
However, a network source countered that it was a “one-off error” that had “nothing to do with short staffing.”
