Current and former colleagues of embattled CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil blasted his rightward turn under the network’s anti-woke editor in chief Bari Weiss.
Dokoupil, 45, has come under fire for conducting softball interviews with key MAGA figures, including President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; praising Trump and his Cabinet members; and playing to Trump’s anti-elite base despite his own privileged background.
He has also ripped into the legacy media for being out of touch with average Americans, despite being the ultimate media insider with a career spanning nearly two decade that has included stints at The Daily Beast, Newsweek, NBC, and now CBS.
That perceived hypocrisy has not endeared him to some members of the newsroom.
“You are the media,” one CBS staffer told the Columbia Journalism Review in a new profile. “Now you get a promotion and you’re gonna talk s--t?”
Another staffer said that Dokoupil is seen as “professional and smart, if a little cocky and looking to climb.” That’s “not unusual for a correspondent,” the source added, but since Dokoupil took over as anchor, “people actually feel badly for him.”
Since Dokoupil took over in January, CBS Evening News has seen a ratings crisis and is projected to suffer its lowest-rated quarter this century, suggesting that Weiss’ anti-woke strategy has alienated existing viewers without attracting new ones.
“I am surprised that he is pretending to be, if not MAGA-aligned, then somehow sympathetic to that worldview,” a former NBC co-worker told CJR. “There was no hint of that whatsoever at NBC.”
Another former NBC colleague said they were “baffled” that Dokoupil would become “a mouthpiece for the state.”
“I always thought he has so much integrity,” the person told CJR.
A CBS spokesperson told the magazine in a statement that the narrative of Dokoupil’s MAGA baiting was “not based in reality.”
“It’s a sad reflection of our current media landscape that Tony and his team’s mission—to deliver trusted journalism to our audience day in and day out—is so controversial,” the statement said.
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
And yet some former colleagues said they weren’t surprised by Dokoupil’s opportunism.
“For him to nod at Bari Weiss’s preferred politics, that doesn’t surprise me,” said Bryan Curtis, an editor at large for The Ringer who worked with Dokoupil at Newsweek. “I don’t remember Tony having politics to begin with.”
Tina Brown, who oversaw Dokoupil at The Daily Beast, said he was a “brilliant writer” and “one of our stars.”
“I thought it was a huge loss to magazines that he had gone the TV route,” she said. “But also he was probably going to make a lot more money.”
Weiss was named editor in chief of CBS last year after the network’s parent company, Paramount, was bought by Trump-friendly billionaire nepo baby David Ellison, who also paid $150 million for Weiss’ Substack The Free Press.
Despite his apparent MAGA cosplay, Dukoupil lives in one of Brooklyn’s most affluent enclave where he shares a three-story townhouse with MS NOW anchor Katy Tur, and their two children. He has boasted of serving her a regular breakfast of eggs sprinkled with za’atar and coffee with oat milk. He has two older children with his first wife, all of whom live in Israel.
