Tony Dokoupil gave himself a pep talk online after a less-than-stellar debut week as CBS Evening News anchor.
Dokoupil, who has been criticized for promising to be “more accountable and more transparent” than revered CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, shared on his Instagram story a friendly comment from someone who said he has “a chance to be the Walter Cronkite of the 21st century.”
Dokoupil on Friday also pushed back against critics of his emotional interview on Tuesday in Miami, where he was raised until he was six years old.
“To help people understand why I have such a reaction: Florida is where I grew up,” the 45-year-old explained in the segment. “My grandmother’s here, my father, my mother, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and it’s where I would have spent all of my childhood, but we left because my father got in trouble with business. We laugh about it now, but he was a drug dealer and he went to jail.”
“The reason it’s so emotional for me is because I feel like I was robbed of the full Miami experience,” he continued, in the same broadcast that he praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Dokoupil said he didn’t understand the backlash.
“This is the video some people are talking about as conduct unbecoming,” he wrote on Instagram. “I don’t get it.”
Critics of that segment were both liberal and conservative. Ben Meiselas, founder of the left-leaning media company MeidasTouch, posted on X: “Pull it together man.” Meanwhile, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly weighed in on her podcast: “There’s no crying in evening news.”
“There might be some crying when a president is shot and assassinated right before your very eyes, like we saw with Walter Cronkite—there was like a wiping of the eyes when he took off the glasses to report that JFK had been shot and killed,” Kelly said. “That’s as far as he went. That’s as far as most evening news anchors would ever have gone, traditionally.”
CBS News has been contacted for comment.
Dokoupil hasn’t just taken flak for his Miami segment and his Cronkite comparison. In his weeknight debut on Monday, awkward difficulties over which story he would be covering caused him to admit on-air that there were “big problems here.” As a result, CBS staffers were reportedly “overwhelmingly depressed.”
After Wednesday’s broadcast of the CBS Evening News, the show’s number 2 producer was let go, The Wrap reported, though the move is not believed to be the direct result of difficulties on CBS’ flagship nighttime show. Still, it amounted to more bad publicity at the network, which Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has been aiming to make more acceptable to conservative audiences.
Dokoupil prefaced his new role at CBS by criticizing the “elites” and the “legacy media.”
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” he said. “Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
Dokoupil, a former Daily Beast reporter who flew in billionaire Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ helicopter this week, attended a $53,000-per-year prep school in Miami, which he said was funded in part by his father’s drug-dealing business. Later, Dokoupil attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in Manhattan for a PhD program.
Dokoupil and his wife, Katy Tur of MS NOW, with whom he has two children, live in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive areas.
Tur, 42, defended her husband on Instagram this week, writing “I love this man” in the comments on his tearful Miami segment.
