CBS News staffers have been fuming over the network’s top talent ever since he released a video complaining about the “legacy media.”
Before CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil took over the anchor chair, he posted a video in January accusing the “legacy media” of having “missed the story” by putting “too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
The video was not well-received inside the CBS newsroom, according to an explosive new report in Vanity Fair detailing Dokoupil’s tumultuous tenure as Evening News anchor.
“I just don’t even understand how you could say something like that,” said one former CBS executive who worked closely with Dokoupil. “He completely lost the room.”
He was tapped to lead the storied news program by MAGA-curious boss Bari Weiss, who was installed at the network by billionaire nepo-baby David Ellison, CEO of CBS’s parent company Paramount Skydance, in their quest to make it more Trump-friendly.
Vanity Fair reports that while Dokoupil was recording his message complaining about the media, he was standing in the middle of the CBS newsroom, and Weiss was just out of the camera’s shot, feeding him lines.
Dokoupil and his wife, MS Now’s Katy Tur, with whom he shares a townhouse in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood, have been a part of the legacy media for over a decade.
The bombshell report details other instances of Weiss working behind the scenes as it relates to several of Dokoupil’s other missteps during his first few weeks anchoring the program.
Just before his first broadcast, Weiss personally stepped in to rewrite some of the script for the teleprompter—a highly unusual move for a TV executive at her level. Her edits, according to one CBS producer, were made to paint President Donald Trump’s foreign policy in a better light.
But Weiss, who had no experience in television news before assuming her role at CBS, messed up her rewrite, the producer said.
“Of course, she writes it in the wrong place,” the producer told Vanity Fair.
Her screw-up resulted in Dokoupil stumbling over his words on his first broadcast and left several seconds of dead air. He acknowledged the awkwardness on-air, telling viewers: “First day, big problems here.”
“What a disaster,” one former CBS News anchor said of the moment. “Honestly, I would’ve f--ing killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”
The next night, staffers were also irate with his decision to dedicate only a few seconds to the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, during which he focused on Trump’s revisionist history of the deadly insurrection attempt.
“President Trump today accused Democrats of failing to prevent the attack on the Capitol, while House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of, quote, ‘whitewashing’ it,” Dokoupil said, before a commercial break. “We’ll be right back.”
Dokoupil rewrote the line, according to a producer who recounted to Vanity Fair: “I saw it and I was just like, What the f--k?”
Later in the same broadcast, he went off script after a segment on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to sign off the show with, “Marco Rubio, we salute you. You’re the ultimate Florida Man.”
The comments only further annoyed staffers on just his second night on the job.
“The Marco Rubio thing was outrageous,” said one CBS News journalist. “It just alienates the audience. I don’t think even a MAGA Republican wants to see that in their news.”
“This is what happens when you get somebody who’s only ever worked on a morning show, where he just thinks, Oh yeah, why don’t we dedicate two minutes of this 19-minute broadcast to glazing Marco f--ing Rubio?” they ranted.
After the whole ordeal on his second broadcast, former longtime CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who has spent years covering the Capitol attack, spoke out on the network’s editorial call against the broadcast. He reportedly found the coverage that night “highly objectionable and personally gutting.”
He quit working at the network several weeks later.
CBS News did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
In a statement to Vanity Fair, a network spokesperson slammed the article’s use of “unnamed sources” and said, “Tony Dokoupil is an exceptional talent and experienced journalist who continues to build a program designed to reach audiences wherever they consume the news.”
His on-air gaffes, some apparently as the result of his boss’s meddling, prompted Dokoupil to plead with viewers to take a chance on him leading the storied news program after his first week on the show saw abysmal ratings compared to rivals ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News.
“You may not agree with everything you hear on this broadcast, but we trust you to listen, and we trust you to decide for yourself,” Dokoupil said, before taking a deep breath to sign off with his closing line, “And that’s another day in America.”
Ratings for the program have hardly improved since the disastrous first few weeks, as they have been consistently lower than those of competitors.
On the week of April 14, just 3.8 million people on average tuned into CBS Evening News, and just 482,000 in the key demo of 25-54 year olds, which TV advertisers closely watch, according to data from Neilsen. The figures are far lower than those of ABC and NBC primetime programming
While CBS is standing by Dokoupil, he was reportedly hardly Weiss’ first choice for the job, either.
She unsuccessfully tried to recruit top TV talent like longtime CNN anchor Anderson Cooper to lead the show. Cooper later quit his role as a correspondent on 60 Minutes, which he held for nearly two decades, just four months into Weiss’ time on the job.
“[Dokoupil] very much was not Bari’s first choice,” one correspondent told Vanity Fair. “He must have been her seventh or eighth choice, because nobody would take the f--ing job. I mean, she wanted Bret Baier. She wanted Anderson Cooper.”
“She wanted a name, and she does not see Tony Dokoupil as a name,” they continued. “A useful idiot for sure, but not a name.”
