Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly offered a bonkers reason why CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil is not landing with viewers.
Kelly blamed CBS News’ new Trump-friendly boss, Bari Weiss, for installing Dokoupil in the evening news desk seat, calling it a misread of what viewers want.
“This is a lesbian’s idea of what women want,” Kelly said on The Megyn Kelly Show.
“Like, ‘He’s sweet, he’s soft, this is what’s going to sell.’ No, no, no, no, no. We want someone with balls, with a spine, someone who will protect us, somebody who, when the burglar comes, is first out the door. They won’t be hiding behind us.”
She added, “It’s very clear, and already it’s failing.”
Kelly, who has previously chastised the MAGA-coded host for sobbing on air while promoting his evening slot on her show, also piled on by dubbing the CBS Evening News anchor “T’Ophrah Dukoupil.”
“That’s what I call him, because he’s crying and constantly trying to therapize us through the news,” Kelly said, invoking talk-show icon Oprah Winfrey.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News for comment.
Dokoupil has had a difficult, headline-grabbing start to his tenure as anchor of CBS News’ flagship evening broadcast.
According to Nielsen’s preliminary measurement, Dokoupil drew in more than 4.4 million total viewers for his first show. But ratings for the program steadily dropped off as the week went on. On Tuesday, 4.3 million total people tuned in, 4.1 million on Wednesday, and 3.9 million on Thursday—an 11.4% loss over the week.
His debut was marred by errors and technical difficulties, and he was later widely criticized for crying on camera while discussing how his childhood in Miami was disrupted by his drug-dealing father.
“The reason it’s so emotional for me is because I feel like I was robbed of the full Miami experience,” Dokoupil said while dramatically wiping away tears during his “Live From America Tour.”
Dokoupil’s father, Tony Dokoupil Sr., was a major drug dealer in Florida during the 1970s and 1980s before losing everything and eventually being arrested and jailed in the early 1990s.
In a 2014 CBS News profile, Dokoupil said his father’s drug empire was so lucrative that it helped pay for his education at Gulliver Preparatory School in South Florida, a private institution that now costs about $53,000 a year and counts Jeb Bush’s children among its alumni.
Despite frequently insisting he is not part of the “elite,” Dokoupil later attended Ivy League Columbia University in Manhattan and now lives in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods with his wife, MS NOW anchor Katy Tur.
After his father walked out on the family, six-year-old Dokoupil and his mother moved from Miami to Maryland in 1986. In a 2009 Newsweek article, Dokoupil described how the two traveled across the country that year in what he later realized was a desperate search for large sums of cash his father had hidden during his drug-dealing days.
Dokoupil’s torrid start at CBS Evening News—which has also proven to be a ratings disaster—featured a cringe sign-off telling viewers: “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.”
“Oh my God, the patronization,” Kelly said after playing the clip on her show. “He’s giving Stuart Smalley vibes,” she added, referencing Al Franken’s self-help parody character on Saturday Night Live.
“I cannot get over how he continues to patronize the audience. Like, ‘Oh, you may not agree with us on everything, but that’s okay,’-Just fucking deliver the f---ing news,” she said.
“You have 19 minutes of content. Get in and get out with the news, and stop trying to hand-hold your audience like they’re a bunch of babies who need you to stroke them through every update.”
